


trade your heart for bones to know

by blackkat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arranged Marriage, Drama, Falling In Love, Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Humor, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Past Child Abuse, Romance, Sugar Daddy Jaster, is it still considered a sugar daddy if you're married?? asking for science, literally a Victorian romance novel with the serial numbers filed off
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:20:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackkat/pseuds/blackkat
Summary: A week after an attack that nearly killed him and his son, Jaster Mereel finds Mostross dead on a battlefield. His killer is a Jedi, grievously wounded, who Jaster takes into his care. By Mandalorian tradition, Jon Antilles owes him a life-debt, and Jaster is cunning enough not to let such a thing slip away.It's meant to be an entirely political arrangement. It doesn't stay that way for long.
Relationships: Arla Fett & Jango Fett & Jaster Mereel, Jaster Mereel/Jon Antilles, Jon Antilles & Arla Fett, Jon Antilles & Jango Fett
Comments: 464
Kudos: 1703
Collections: Absolute favourites, Star Wars Alternate Universes





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic does contain an age difference between the main ship - Jon is 27, and Jaster is 38. If this is the kind of thing that's going to squick you, please be aware.

Jaster finds the Jedi in the middle of a field of bodies, Montross two halves of a corpse beside him. There's no one else around for miles, just dead Death Watch soldiers, dead traitors, and one Jedi who’s miraculously still breathing.

For a long moment, Jaster stays where he is, studying the scene. He’s not quite sure how to feel, because Montross was his to kill, and every Mandalorian knew of Jaster's claim. But Montross was also dangerous, was gathering allies, knew too much. His treachery almost killed Jaster once already, almost killed _Jango_ , and Jaster isn’t about to question the gift of his enemies doing away with each other.

Except—

Except they didn’t, because the Jedi is still alive. He stirs faintly when Jaster presses a boot under him, but the movement is sluggish, not a threat. Satisfied, Jaster shoves him over onto his back, watching the deep hood fall away. A Human Jedi, not much older than Jango, with dark hair and a scarred face, dressed in dark colors, and he groans a little, lashes fluttering but not rising. His breaths are weak, wet, and there's blood around his mouth, a blaster wound obvious in his gut. It’s closing as Jaster watches, though slowly, and he looks from the hand the Jedi has pressed to his stomach up to that blood-splattered face and makes a decision.

Jedi are the enemy. But—

They weren’t always. They _aren’t_ always. And given the number of bodies on the field, the way Montross was bisected, the way his favorite blaster is in two pieces as his feet, like the Jedi took the shot to the gut in order to get close enough to make the kill, Jaster is willing to say that this Jedi is a bit more like a Mandalorian than most of his kind.

“Still alive, Jedi?” he asks, pulling off a gauntlet to press his fingertips to the Jedi's throat. There's a pulse, and it’s thready, but—not immediately deadly, given the way he’s healing himself. He’ll be healed before he runs out of blood, most likely, or at least enough so to survive the night.

This planet gets cold, though, and there's a snowstorm coming; if he has to lie out in that for hours, hypothermia will take him before the gut wound can.

There's a pause, and then, like it takes effort, the Jedi's eyes slide open, blink. They're pale blue, vague with pain and blood loss, but after a long, long moment they fix on Jaster, manage to focus. The Jedi breathes out, a cloud of white on the wind, and then his eyes fall closed again.

“Mand’alor,” he gets out, rasping, rough. “I took—took your vengeance. Apologies.”

Jaster pauses, startled, and looks him over again. Rough robes, patched tunics, and there's a hole in his left boot. Not the highly polished diplomat Jaster is used to in one of his Order, certainly, or even one of the stuffy scholars Jaster's spent so much time trying to pry old documents out of. A poor specimen, except for the fact that he’s clearly more skilled than most Jedi, to have survived an attack against a whole battalion of the Death Watch.

Except for the fact that he knows Jaster had claimed Montross’s death, and respects the claim enough to offer an apology for subverting it.

“By True Mandalorian code, you forfeit your life to me by acknowledging that,” Jaster says mildly, and pulls off his helmet, setting it in the snow beside him. “Regardless of whether you're a Mandalorian or not.”

The Jedi's mouth curves, quietly rueful, and he lifts his hand. His tunics are drenched in blood, black with it, but in the fading daylight Jaster can see not one blaster wound, but three, clustered tight together in his gut. “Not much life,” he manages, and turns his head as he coughs, body convulsing. Blood spills from his lips, and Jaster watches him struggle to breathe, to stay conscious. Doesn’t move, but—

“If you did live,” he says, finally reaching out to pull the Jedi's head back towards him. “Would you honor the debt? Montross was mine to kill, and you stole my revenge for the wounding of my son.”

“Sorry,” the Jedi breathes, like he’s losing the thread of the conversation. Jaster tightens his grip on his chin, shaking him lightly, and with obvious effort those pale eyes focus on him again.

“Jedi, answer me,” Jaster says sharply, and the Jedi grimaces, but tips his head.

“I honor it,” he gets out, and Jaster lets him go, satisfied. Stealing a death like Montross’s would be an outrage without compare for any True Mandalorian, and not just because of who spoke for his death. Jaster is the Mand’alor, but—

Montross almost killed Jango with his desertion. With his _betrayal_. And then, just a handful of days ago, he made another attempt, and this one almost succeeded. If Arla hadn’t come upon the scene with a medic bare moments after it happened, Jango would be dead instead of just confined to a biobed for the near future.

Montross’s life was Jaster's to take, and while Jaster is practical enough not to regret the fact that he’s dead at all, the loss of vengeance stings.

Practicality has other uses, too, though. There's a gift laid out at Jaster's feet, a Jedi alone and dying, his life now Jaster's. Once, in the past, a Mandalorian might have just executed him outright for the insult and been done with it, but Jaster is cleverer than that. One Jedi's existence will carry little weight when brought to bear against the Senate, but the Order is another matter entirely. A Knight on their own, capable of what this man accomplished, is a valuable resource, and Jaster hadn’t thought he would ever have enough leverage to treat with the Jedi directly, but this might just be what he needs.

Amusing, that Montross’s betrayal could bring the True Mandalorians the one thing that will finally solidify them as the true rulers of Mandalore.

And—

Well. It must have been a good fight, looking at the scene that’s left. Montross was a danger, and the Jedi put him down, and he’s shivering in the snow in patched robes and worn-out boots, entirely alone. Jaster is the Mand’alor, but he has a heart as well. Especially for fighters.

“Good,” Jaster says, and leans down. The Jedi watches him, wary but resigned, and when Jaster raises his hand, the Jedi flinches, closing his eyes like he’s expecting a blow.

Jaster doesn’t hit him. He strokes tangled dark hair out of the Jedi's face, smiles a little at the startled look. “You fought well,” he says, and those pale eyes widen. The Jedi hesitates, like he’s not sure what to do with that, and Jaster takes one bloody hand, pulls it up around his neck. “Hold on to me,” he says, and gets the Jedi's other arm up, then slides his own arm beneath the Jedi's knees.

As gently as he’s able, he eases the Jedi up, one arm around his back, and grimaces a little at the choked cry of pain. “Shh,” he soothes, and rises, hauling the young man up as he gets his feet under him. There's a gasp, fingers gone claw-tight on his shoulders, and a strangled sob, but Jaster gets him up and holds him there for a long moment.

Slowly, gradually, those trembling, hitching breaths even out, and the Jedi presses his face into Jaster's shoulder, pale and shaking but still conscious. That’s impressive enough all on its own, and Jaster keeps his steps as light as possible as he turns back towards his ship and activates his comm.

“Sir?” Myles answers instantly, tone tight, and Jaster snorts.

“There are only corpses down here,” he says. “I'm in no danger, Myles.”

Slowly, Myles lets out a breath. “Montross?” he asks.

“Also dead,” Jaster answers. “Have the medical bay standing by for my arrival. Montross’s killer is still with us, if only barely.”

There's a long pause, and then Myles asks, “You don’t just want to execute him?”

Jaster glances down at the Jedi, bleeding out in his arms but still clinging to awareness. His eyes are on Jaster, wary as a wild animal in a trap, and Jaster smiles, just a little.

“No,” he says. “I think I would very much like him in one piece.”

“They’ll be waiting, sir,” Myles answers. “Anything else?”

Jaster glances back towards the battlefield as he reaches the top of the hill. There are native carrion birds already beginning to circle, and even if he personally finds the Death Watch’s beliefs repugnant and worthy of condemnation, they're dead. They're dead and they were Mandalorians, and they believed in what they fought for. He can honor that.

“Find volunteers to help build a pyre,” he says. “And to gather the bodies for it. All except Montross. His soul can rot in nothingness forever, for what he planned for my family.”

The Jedi stares at him for one long, fraught second, then exhales. His eyes slide closed, and Jaster watches him breathe, shallow but unfaltering, all the way back to the shuttle.

It’s a little like finding a kyber crystal in the mud, Jaster thinks, lowering the Jedi into the copilot’s seat as gently as he can. The young man is unconscious, and he doesn’t stir when Jaster tucks his hair back behind one ear, assesses his scars. Deep and old, most of them, but there are new ones as well, and Jaster brushes the backs of his fingers over them, thoughtful and a touch curious. He has a face that isn't quite pretty, even without the scars, but it’s certainly arresting.

Thoughts for another time, Jaster decides, and starts the ship’s engines. The Jedi will survive until they're back on the main ship, and then—

Well. Several dozen plans that Jaster had previously dismissed as unworkable are suddenly astonishingly feasible, _and_ a traitor to his cause is dead. It’s been quite the productive day, if entirely unexpected.

It’s _warm_.

It takes Jon a long, long stretch of minutes to realize why this is strange. He’s buried in heat, in soft blankets, with a surface beneath him that’s softer than anything he’s ever slept on before, and the world is quiet except for the distant hum of minds. It’s peaceful, and there's no sense of threat anywhere within range of his senses. Jon curls deeper into the warmth, feeling real fur against his bare skin, and doesn’t want to open his eyes. Whatever sort of dream this is, whatever near-death hallucination it is brought on by cold and blood loss and exhaustion, he doesn’t want it to end.

And then, like a shock of cold water, he remembers _why_ he was bleeding out, and his breath hitches. He jerks up, alarm ringing through him, and—

Stops. Because he’s not on a battlefield, and even though he’s awake, there's no doubt that the warmth is real. He’s in a large bed, piled with blankets, and the room around him is lit by a fire in the wide hearth, the regular lights kept low. A lamp illuminates a corner of the room with tall, deep bookshelves lining the walls, a comfortable chair right beneath the light. Wide windows look out on a darkened field, a pair of full moons in the sky. It’s nowhere Jon has ever seen before, and he sits up fully, clutching one of the thicker furs and trying to remember what happened.

He’d heard, while undercover as a smuggler, that one of the True Mandalorians’ declared enemies had been seen, that they were staging a raid on a nearby world very soon. Jedi are discouraged from getting involved in Mandalorian politics, but Jon hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of so many lives lost, so he’d just…left. Left the mission, left the smuggler’s crew, and hunted Montross down, even knowing that the Mand’alor had claimed the bastard’s life.

If the Mand’alor had been there, Jon would gladly have let him kill Montross. But Jon was the one available, and Montross wasn’t going to let one setback stop him from killing more innocents. Even knowing there was a vendetta on Montross’s head, a claim any Mandalorian would kill Jon for subverting, he’d known the risk of Montross getting away was too great.

Jon is a Jedi. No matter the personal cost, he had to stop the threat. So he did.

And then—

“Awake?” a voice asks, and Jon stiffens, then raises his head to find a figure leaning in the doorway. The Mand’alor watches him in return, and Jon has never seen holos of Jaster Mereel without his helmet on, but there's still no doubting who he is. Just like there was no doubting it when he found Jon on the battlefield.

_Would you honor the debt? Montross was mine to kill, and you stole my revenge for the wounding of my son._

_I honor it._

He means it still. Even if he’s not dying right now, Jon will keep his word, because he gave it, because Jedi honor their promises. He has no idea what Jaster wants with him, no expectation that it will be anything good when the Jedi and Mandalorians are enemies, but he knowingly killed Montross, acknowledging all of the potential consequences. This was one of them.

“Yes,” he says quietly, and the words are rough, his throat dry. He pulls the blankets a little more tightly around himself, not sure what to say. Not sure what all of this is for, or why Jaster carried him off the battlefield when he was so clearly dying anyway.

“Good,” Jaster says, and approaches the bed with measured steps. “Lie back. The medics are confident you won't die, but I'm supposed to apply bacta to the wound as often as possible.”

Jon presses a hand to his stomach in surprise, and—the skin is tender, but there's no scar. Someone used a dermal mender on him, with skill and in enough time not to leave scar tissue, and Jon had thought it was just his own healing working, slow and rough, but—

“Lie back,” Jaster says again, and Jon swallows but does as he’s told.

With an approving sound, Jaster picks up a small tub of bacta from the floor, then sits down on the edge of the bed, unscrewing the top. “You managed to find Montross and his Death Watch cell when none of my contacts could,” he says, and Jon wants to twitch away from the look in his dark eyes. “An impressive feat.”

Jon swallows, still not sure what to do with any of this. If Jaster wants to execute him for stealing a kill that was rightfully his, healing him seems counterproductive. “I was…undercover,” he says. “With the Fire Hand gang. They were supplying some of the Death Watch’s weapons, and a contact warned them Montross was about to stage a raid on a planet where they sometimes did business. I couldn’t let him get that far.”

Jaster studies him for a long moment, like he’s weighing Jon's words, and then inclines his head. “The Fire Hand,” he repeats, a touch grim. “I hadn’t heard they had ties to the Death Watch, but given their reputation, it’s unsurprising.”

The idea of giving Jaster the Order’s information on any of this shouldn’t sit right, and Jon hesitates, but—the True Mandalorians are just as opposed to the Death Watch and their tactics as the Order is, if not more so, and Jon would rather pass on the information to Jaster than have it sit in waiting as the Council deals with a thousand other matters that are of more immediate concern. The Order is always stretched thin, and the Outer Rim has fewer people, fewer senators petitioning for assistance; it’s understandable that resources turn towards the Core worlds and the Inner Rim, but Jon has never had much patience for such things. The Outer Rim is where he operates, and he won't turn his back on it, even if that means relying on the Jedi's traditional enemies.

“There’s a network,” he says. “I was trying to follow all the threads, and find the person organizing them, but I haven’t yet. I—”

Jaster lays a hand over his stomach, Jon flinches automatically, tensing, braced for the sharp, abrasive slash of Dark Woman’s healing. Even ten years out from being her padawan, his body still expects the healing—and the lesson of having to _be_ healed—to hurt just as much as the original wound.

“Shh,” Jaster soothes, and his touch is gentle as he eases the blanket down, his fingers light as they feel out the edges of the wound. “Only bacta. You look as though you haven’t seen enough of it in your life.”

The scars. Jon closes his eyes, because it’s the only way he can hide right now, but he wants his cloak, his hood, something to hide him from Jaster's gaze. It doesn’t matter if he picks up scars during a mission, but—

In the aftermath, when people have to look at him, it starts to matter far more. And Jon doesn’t _regret_ them, but he regrets the reaction they cause, the way they make him look. The reminder they pose, because if Jon had been a better student, if he’d had the same skill Dark Woman did—

A hand catches his chin, gently but firmly pulling him back to face Jaster. “You’ve lived a warrior’s life,” Jaster says, and when Jon opens his eyes, startled, Jaster lets go, smoothing his fingers over Jon's hair. “The map of it stays on your skin, as it should.”

There's no response Jon can make, no translating the tangle of emotion in his chest into words. Instead, he drops his eyes as much as he can and says, “My comm. There are notes, about the Fire Hand gang and their contacts. I haven’t figured out which link to the Death Watch yet, but—”

Jaster's hand covers his forehead, one light touch to hold him still. “You need to rest before you do anything else,” Jaster says, and Jon stops, almost bewildered by the words. This is concerning Jaster's enemies, terrorists trying to destroy his people. Jon had thought—

“You were shot six times, by my medics’ count,” Jaster says, amused, and his other hand gently strokes the bacta across Jon's stomach. Jon twitches, but there's no avoiding the touch, and the bacta soothes the ache he hadn’t even realized was creeping up on him. He breathes out, closing his eyes, and Jaster hums quietly.

“You're on Concord Dawn,” he says, and his voice is low. It makes Jon want to shiver, and between the tone and the soft touch, he feels…caught. Out of his depth with the bed beneath him and furs around him and Jaster leaning over him, still watching. “Tor Vizsla staged an attack on my main compound on Mandalore, so this seemed a safe alternative. As far as I'm aware, he doesn’t know of its existence, so we have some time to regroup.”

 _We_. Because Jon's life belongs to the Mand’alor now. Jon swallows, but manages, “No one nearby intends harm.”

There's a pause, Jaster's hand stilling against his skin, and Jaster makes a quiet sound of amusement. “Jedi premonitions?”

“No,” Jon says honestly, and opens his eyes to look up at him. “The people here—all I feel from them is concern for you.”

Jaster is silent for a long moment before he finally smiles, just faintly. “The Death Watch is full of thugs,” he says, “and criminals looking for an excuse to hurt others. But the True Mandalorians will outlast them.” Leaning forward, he smooths more bacta over a blaster graze across Jon's shoulder, and Jon flinches despite himself, closing his eyes again.

The brush of fingers in his hair comes as a surprise, and Jon startles, but the hand just drags overly-long strands out of his eyes and tucks them back.

“You were unconscious for almost three days,” Jaster says, his voice still that same low, soothing cadence. “But the medics say that you should be well enough to put your feet on the ground by tomorrow. Until then, rest.”

Jon curls his fingers into the blankets. “I need to—find them,” he manages. “The Death Watch. If I keep following the suppliers—”

There's a quiet snort. “My people have been looking for the Death Watch’s main base for a very long time now. Since well before Montross betrayed us,” he counters. “One Jedi in the fray will change very little. You have more than enough time to heal, and then we can discuss what you know.” A pause, and then Jaster says, “Your health will be far more of an asset to me than your efforts while half-dead, Jedi.”

Before Jon can answer, there's a rap at the door. “Mand’alor,” a voice calls through it. “Jango is awake and asking for you.”

Jon watches the relief rise in Jaster's face, the way he pushes to his feet automatically, then pauses. He glances back at Jon, and says, pitched to carry, “I’ll be right there, thank you.”

“Yes, sir.” Steps move away from the door, and in their wake, Jaster lean down and pulls the blanket back up over Jon's chest.

“I may be gone a few hours,” he says. “Sleep if you can, and we’ll speak later.”

Jon nods, and Jaster appraises him for another moment, then asks, “Your name, Jedi?”

Startled, Jon blinks. He hadn’t realized that he’d failed to give it. “Jon,” he says. “Jon Antilles.” Jaster's brows rise faintly, and Jon grimaces, knowing where his thoughts are going. “It’s the only one I have to give.”

Amusement touches the curve of Jaster's mouth. “Then it’s the one I’ll take,” he says, and leans over. The lift of his hand makes Jon flinch, never good with things near his face, but there's no blow. Knuckles skim across a scar, fingers tuck his hair back behind his ear, and Jaster straightens again.

“Later,” he says, a promise, and leaves the room with long strides, the door sliding shut behind him with a soft hiss.

For a long, long moment, Jon lies where he is, not quite able to breathe for reasons unrelated to the blaster wounds in his stomach. His cheek burns where Jaster touched him, and he sits up slowly, pulling his knees to his chest regardless of how it makes the wound pull unpleasantly. There's an ache somewhere in his chest that has nothing to do with wounds, and he closes his eyes, presses his face into his knees, and tries to remember how to breathe.

He should get up, keep moving. Find his comm, contact the Order, let them know that him dropping out of his mission in the middle was for a reason. Should contact Dark Woman and let her know about the Fire Hand Gang, since she was the one who pointed him to them to begin with. She might have more information, though she won't give it up gladly, particularly if she knows he intends to offer it up to the True Mandalorians.

But—she doesn’t need to know. Jon learned a very long time ago that telling her anything but what she wanted to hear was never going to end well.

He drags a hand through his hair, grimacing at the stiffness of dried blood in the strands, the pull of a new scar that he _did_ manage to heal before Montross shot him. A fresher would also be a good idea, but—

His body aches, and the idea of standing is…unpleasant. All the things he _should_ be doing feel unimportant in the face of the knowledge that he’s promised his life away to a Mandalorian. Not just _a_ Mandalorian, but the _Mand’alor_ , the man who’s managed the nearly impossible task of uniting the majority of Mandalore’s clans behind him. He’s…powerful. He’s one of the Order’s traditional enemies, too, and Jon has no idea what he even wants.

It’s not hubris for Jon to know that he himself is a powerful Jedi. He isn't what Dark Woman wanted him to be, but she made sure he was strong, dangerous. If Jaster wants Jon to fight for him, demands he honor his debt with service on the battlefield, Jon will have to decide where the lines fall, what he can do as a Jedi, as someone with a life debt. And—it won't _control_ him. He won't let himself be forced into evil things. But the idea that he might do things that go against the Order—that’s a less-clear line.

There's little doubt that Jaster _will_ want him to fight. It’s what Jon is good at, and Jaster said he had lived a warrior’s life. Why remark on it if it wasn’t something he wanted to take advantage of?

With a rasping breath, Jon slides out of the bed, stumbles as his feet hit the floor and almost falls. He’s naked, and the air is bitingly cold, but after a second to breathe and control the pain, Jon drags one of the blankets off the bed, wraps it around himself. The urge to lie down and sleep is there, but restlessness prickles under Jon's skin, digs claws into his spine that the ache in his stomach and chest can't blot out. Healing himself will have to wait until he’s stronger, but in the meantime, just lying down and _waiting_ for whatever fight Jaster will send him into isn't something Jon can do. He needs _something_.

Three steps across the cold floor already has his vision spinning, though, and Jon makes it to the chair in the corner and decides that’s far enough. He sinks into it with a groan, because there’s no one around to hear, and curls there for a moment, trying to get his breath back.

It’s still quiet. There are a handful of minds moving, a handful of people awake, and Jon can sense the low thrum of overall contentment that’s like a balm on frayed nerves. Closing his eyes, he matches his breathing to the pulse of it, settles back in the chair and draws his legs up, pulls the blanket more tightly around himself. A sharp lance of pain makes him hiss, makes him take another moment to brace through it, but—

The bed is too soft. Jon can't lie there waiting for something to happen. Making it five meters away won't do much in the long run, but it’s _something_ , and Jon can read, if he needs to. Can distract himself, and not think about what he swore, and how he really does mean it, even now.

Jaster Mereel doesn’t feel like an evil man. He smiled, when Jon said his people loved him, and felt…warm. The care for his son is obvious, too.

Jon has met men who were far worse than Jaster with far less reason. He just—doesn’t know how it will apply to _him_ , and the thought of finding out makes it a little hard to breathe.

Or maybe, Jon thinks ruefully, dropping his head back against the chair, that’s the blaster wound in his stomach. Sometimes it’s just hard to tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know when you hit rock-bottom in rare pair hell and then you're like "but what if I got a shovel".
> 
> Yeah.


	2. Chapter 2

There's a familiar figure in white-accented armor waiting in the hallway outside the medical wing, and Jaster quickens his step as he approaches her. He can't help but smile at the sight of masses of blonde hair still pulled into the braid he wove this morning, fourteen years of ritual still holding steady despite the recent upheaval.

“Arla,” he says, and his daughter raises her head from the study of her comm and gives him a crooked smile.

“Jaster,” she says. “I knew if I lurked here long enough you’d show up.”

Not fooled in the slightest, Jaster raises a brow at her, but takes the hands she holds out to him and pulls her in, resting their foreheads together for a moment before he lets her go. “You saw your brother?” he asks.

Arla raises a brow right back. “I saw the idiot,” she confirms. “He’s going to be stuck to that bed until Myles lets him out.”

“Myles has the sense to keep him in it long enough to heal,” Jaster says, unbothered by the thought. Myles has been his right hand long enough that Jango will respect his orders, even if he might not respect Jaster's.

“Myles inspires enough fear to keep him in it long enough to heal,” Arla corrects, and her smirk makes Jaster snort, conceding the point. When Jaster settles back against the wall beside her, she leans in, lightly bumping her pauldron against his shoulder, and says, “Speaking of Myles, he was saying you brought home a Jedi.”

“If only my spy network worked as fast as the rumor mill,” Jaster says. It’s not the first time he’s felt that way, and he’s absolutely sure it won't be the last. “I found the Jedi who killed Montross on the battlefield and brought him back.”

Arla’s eyes are sharp, thoughtful as she studies him, tugging at the end of her braid. The ribbon is fraying, which means she’s been doing that a lot in the last few hours. She always does worry for Jango more than she would ever admit. “Did he acknowledge it?” she asks, a little wary. “The life-debt.”

Jaster thinks of the man in his bed, so quiet and so cautious. Given to flinching, and Jaster will admit he doesn’t like that much at all. But—it’s early yet. He has time to work out all the little things that cause those reactions and then avoid them. “He did. When he was half-dead, and then again just now.”

Arla frowns, looking so much like her brother for a moment that Jaster can't help but smile. “That’s something,” she allows. “How long until the Jedi Order as a whole comes crashing down on our heads?”

Jaster hums, light. “I do wonder,” he says, and ignores the exasperated look Arla shoots him. It’s good to keep both of his children on their toes. Reaching out, he claps a hand against her vambrace, then pushes away from the wall. “The borders are quiet?”

“No one’s made a stink about you technically being banished yet, if that’s what you're asking,” Arla says dryly, folding her arms across her chest. “Jaster. The Order?”

“Sorry, Jango was asking for me,” Jaster says without shame, and hits the button to open the medical wing door.

Arla’s huff is all exasperation and annoyance. “Old man, keeping secrets stopped being cute when we were _sixteen_ —”

The door slides shut before she can finish, and Jaster allows himself a flicker of amusement as he pauses to accept another tub of bacta from a medical droid. It was most unhappy when Jaster removed Jon from the medical wing, and it’s been comming him reminders about bacta all day, but—well. Jaster had thought it best not to let Jango wake up in the same room as a Jedi. Particularly a Jedi who killed Montross. Jango's been incredibly set on executing Montross himself, to the point that even Jaster's vendetta took second place.

Not that Jaster can blame him. A week of seeing Jango in a biobed, pale and unmoving, and Jaster was ready to burn down wide swathes of the galaxy just to get to Montross before anyone else did. Jango was the one who carried Jaster back to camp when Montross’s betrayal almost killed him. Neither of them is impartial in this.

“Keep making Arla mad and she’s going to put a rancor in your bed again,” a voice says, rough with disuse, and Jaster turns away from the medical droid’s very insistent readout to find the blanket covering the closest biobed has shifted. Jango is watching him, looking tired and drawn, but he’s conscious, and the wash of relief that sweeps through Jaster is strong enough to make his breath shudder in his chest.

“Jango,” he says, and crosses the space between them in a handful of long strides. Jango slides a hand out from under the blanket, and Jaster wraps his own around it, squeezing tightly as he glances up at the readouts above them. They're stable, precisely what they weren’t a week ago, and Jaster breathes out, then carefully sinks down in the chair beside the bed.

“If your sister can manage to put another half-grown rancor in my bed, she’s welcome to,” he says. “I still don’t know how she managed the first one, but sheer skill must be respected.”

Jango scoffs, then grimaces, pressing a hand to his chest. “Myles finally made you go do your work?” he asks, and Jaster raises a brow at the change of subject but lets it lie.

“Yes,” he allows. “Researching new leads as to who was helping Montross.”

Jango's expression slides into barely contained violence. “When you find him—”

“We did,” Jaster says evenly. “Montross is dead.”

Jango freezes, eyes widening. Stares at Jaster for a long moment, then huffs, thumping his head back against the pillow. “Should have saved a piece for me,” he says, dissatisfied. “Where was he?”

Jaster weighs his words for a moment. One thing to avoid the conversation, but—letting Jango cling to the wrong conclusion is a little too much like lying, and Jaster refuses to lie to his children. “I wasn’t the one who killed him,” he says.

Something cold slides into Jango's face, edged with fury. “Arla?” he asks tightly, though from that tone he already knows the answer. “She said she was aiming for Tor Vizsla, but knowing her—”

“No,” Jaster says. “It wasn’t Arla, either.” He lets that settle, watches Jango's fury rise as he pushes up on one elbow in the bed.

“Montross nearly _killed_ you,” he says, a sharp-edged snarl. “He was for _our_ clan to kill!”

Jaster shifts his grip on Jango's hand, pulls. Jango hisses in frustration, but lets himself be pushed back down flat, even though he looks deeply displeased by it. Not unexpected, Jaster thinks, and considers how to frame the news.

“The man who took his head killed the entire Death Watch squad Montross was leading,” he says, and Jango's brows rise, faintly impressed despite his best efforts. It makes Jaster snort a little, amused, and he sits back, keeping his grip on Jango's wrist. He can feel Jango’s pulse beneath his fingertips, and—it’s a comfort. “He was alive when I reached the battlefield, and he acknowledged the debt and gave me information on the smugglers who have been helping Vizsla.”

“That’s…something,” Jango says, wary as he watches Jaster's face. “So what aren’t you telling me?”

Jaster will never complain that his children are too intelligent. Jango is tactically brilliant, and Arla has a wickedly sharp mind when it comes to people, and both are great benefits to the True Mandalorians. But at the same time, he sometimes wishes that _he_ could skirt around issues without either of them noticing.

Still. Telling Jango now, when he’s forbidden to leave the bed, let alone the medical wing, is probably the best option. There will be plenty of time for him to think things through and come around to Jaster's plan. Hopefully.

Or Jango will spend the next two weeks stewing and erupt into a rage the moment he lays eyes on the Jedi. It’s always rather hard to tell with Jango.

“He’s a Jedi,” Jaster says evenly, and Jango's expression twists. Before he can even open his mouth, though, Jaster raises a hand, and says, “Jango. A Jedi with his life sworn to me can only benefit us when we move to have the Senate recognize the True Mandalorians as the leaders of Mandalore. Consider the implications.”

“He’s a _Jedi_ ,” Jango snaps. “He should be _target practice_ , not skulking around our base—”

“I'm going to marry him,” Jaster says, and Jango's mouth snaps shut.

There's a long, long moment of incredulous silence. Jaster holds his son’s gaze steadily, unwilling to waver. Despite Jango's promise, Jaster is still the Mand’alor, and what he says is the law. Jango can protest all he likes in private, but they’d best have a united front in public, or the Death Watch will try and wriggle into the cracks.

“This,” Jango finally says, “is just your newest plot to get into the Jedi Archives.”

Jaster snorts, but refuses to deny that it’s a definite bonus. “I’ll be expected to go to Coruscant once we officially appoint a senator regardless,” he says. “That harridan Jedi _witch_ can't deny access to the spouse of a Jedi—”

“Jedi don’t _take_ spouses,” Jango points out, but there's a curl of reluctant amusement to his mouth, which was the point. “All your grand plans are going to come crashing down when they boot him out of the Order for going along with you.”

Jaster hums lightly, thinking of scars, of a battlefield under a brewing winter storm. “Then we will have another fighter for our cause,” he says, “and one who killed a whole Death Watch squad singlehandedly.”

There's a flicker of something like reservation, a wariness in Jaster's chest. He doesn’t _actively_ wish to remove a Jedi from his Order, or strip the man he saved of all ties to his world. But at the same time, Jaster is Mand’alor. His people come first. And given the Jedi's skill, Jaster suspects that the Order won't surrender him so easily, which is precisely the best course for Jaster as well.

Jango makes a skeptical sound, then winces. He closes his eyes for a long moment, then breathes out slowly as the pain settles, and says, “Assuming he keeps his word and doesn’t just vanish into the night.”

“I have his name,” Jaster says, unbothered by the thought. “His physical presence as part of this would be helpful, but it’s not required.”

After all, a Jedi on his arm to show off to the handful of clans thinking or suspected of backing the Death Watch will be a perfect, silent warning, but just having the Jedi's name beside his on a marriage certificate is enough of a threat of support from the Order. Jaster likes plans with multiple contingencies, and he’d hardly take a different approach in his personal life. At least as much as he still _has_ a personal life.

With an unimpressed grunt, Jango waves a hand at him. “Go plot somewhere else,” he says. “And make sure Arla knows not to kill your Jedi. She’s trigger-happy.”

“Only when you make her trigger-happy,” Jaster says, amused, but he rises to his feet and leans forward. It’s a sign of how close a call this was that Jango doesn’t protest the kiss on the forehead, and his hand squeezes around Jaster's, far weaker than normal, before he lets go.

“Montross is dead,” Jaster says quietly, and touches his son’s cheek. Twice Montross almost killed him, but—the Jedi executed Montross handily, and Jaster's practical enough to still feel the vindication of that action, even if he wanted Montross’s head on his own wall.

Jango's smile is crooked. “Just Vizsla now,” he says, and closes his eyes.

Jaster doesn’t bother reminding him that killing Tor Vizsla will be far, far harder than killing one traitor. Vizsla has the support of far too many Mandalorians for Jaster's comfort, and the civil war is still raging in pockets as the True Mandalorians push the Death Watch back. Jaster's people hold much of the political power, but—not all of it.

The backing of the Jedi Order, even tacitly, will do more than Jaster can say to change that.

Quietly, Jaster leaves Jango to his rest, slipping out of the medical wing before the droid can catch him again. The bacta in his pocket is already plenty, even with the Jedi's injuries; the medics on Jaster's cruiser did well enough when they patched him up originally. Now all that’s left for him to do is rest and finish healing. And after that—

After that, Jaster will need to start planning a wedding.

Given that they're in the midst of a system-wide civil war, everyone will excuse a small ceremony, even if Jaster is Mand’alor. He can make sure all the most relevant figures are in attendance, surround himself with the main force of the True Mandalorians, and be certain that word reaches every corner of the system regarding just who and what Jaster's new spouse is. Having it here on Concord Dawn would be simplest, assuming the governor and the Journeyman Protectors are willing to lift Jaster's exile from the planet. They should; the bastard of an officer Jaster killed was _proven_ to be corrupt, years ago now, and it’s been something of a power-play from the governor, keeping Jaster exiled. Jaster's let it stand, because he did commit a crime, but—no more. The war is getting too tight for that much leeway to be given.

For a moment, Jaster considers finding Myles and setting things in motion, getting arrangements started, but at the intersection of corridors, he pauses. To the right lie his quarters, and he weighs what needs to be done against the hour, then breathes out, turns.

His children are both here, both safe. Jango is recovering, and Arla is on guard, and this one night there’s nothing that needs Jaster's immediate attention. He’s going to drag a stranger into marriage, going to have a Jedi tie himself to Jaster's life for political reasons, which is already frowned upon in Mandalorian culture. The very least Jaster can do in return is care for him, spend a little time with him. If they actually get along, all for the better.

It shouldn’t be the difficult decision. The man is clearly a fighter, a warrior, with enough determination to make a Mandalorian proud. Jaster has never encountered a Jedi on his side of a conflict, has only faced them as an enemy and a rival, but—he can adjust, rearrange. An in with the Order isn't something Jaster ever thought would be a realistic goal, and yet here he stands. Montross is a corpse, there’s a Jedi in Jaster's bed, and the True Mandalorians may actually manage to secure their position of power in Mandalore’s government before the Death Watch or the blasted pacifist movement that’s creeping in from the edges can.

Mandalorians are meant to fight. Their _history_ is built on a warrior’s ways. Jaster would care less about the pacifists if they didn’t want to erase all of Mandalore’s culture in the process of ending the fighting.

Slow, careful, Jaster presses his anger down, waving a hand at the scanner beside his door. The door slides open, perfectly silent, and he stalks through, trying not to let his irritation overwhelm him. Thinking of the Kalevalans and their attempt to _reform_ Mandalore in their image is a sure way to raise his blood pressure, and that annoyance is the last thing Jaster needs when dealing with a wounded man.

A wounded man who’s no longer in Jaster's bed.

Jaster comes to a sharp halt, a sharp whip-crack of suspicion lancing through him as he takes in the bare pillows, the empty tangle of blankets. Jango's words about the Jedi disappearing into the night are an unpleasant trickle of suspicion, and Jaster surveys the bed for a moment, then turns on his heel—

And stops dead, because the bed might be empty but the chair in the corner isn't. The Jedi is curled up there, one of the blankets wrapped around himself, bony limbs tucked up in a way that makes him look smaller than Jaster know he is. There's a book hanging from his fingertips, and he’s fast asleep, head pillowed on the curve of the chair’s back.

Suspicion and budding anger vanish, replaced by a wash of amusement, and Jaster snorts before he can help himself. Quietly, he crosses to the chair, deftly rescuing the book before it can fall and glancing at the cover. It’s a history of smithing techniques on one of the planets in the neighboring sector, dry and tedious despite Jaster's general interest in the subject, and he’s used it as a sleep aid more than once before. It’s no surprise that the Jedi wasn’t able to get very far into it, either.

Marking the page with one of the ribbons on the table, Jaster sets the book aside, then leans down, brushing those stubborn strands of hair out of the Jedi's eyes again. They’re black, inclined to the faintest hint of curl, and cut so roughly that Jaster suspects the Jedi did the job himself with a vibroblade, and likely without the aid of a mirror. It’s amusing, particularly given Jaster's experience with other Jedi, always primly polished and staid to the point of tedium. He’s _certainly_ rougher than the harpy who refuses to let Jaster so much as set foot in her Archives, no matter how many requests he sends to her.

“Jon,” Jaster says, quiet, and halfway expects it not to garner a reaction. The name sounds fake, so obviously so that Jaster is inclined to believe it is, but the Jedi stirs like it’s enough to rouse him. Pale eyes slide open, immediately flickering to Jaster, and there's a jerk like the Jedi is going to recoil right out of the chair. With visions of what the medical droid will do to him if that happens dancing in his head, Jaster catches Jon by the shoulder, pins him where he is—

There’s a full-body flinch, like Jaster just swung at his face, and Jon goes very, very still.

A little insulted by the reaction, Jaster raises a brow, meeting Jon's eyes. “Jedi,” he says dryly. “I believe I told you to stay in bed.”

Jon swallows, gaze flickering to Jaster's hand and then up to his eyes. “I know,” he says hoarsely. “I was just—restless. Forgive me.”

It’s not as if Jaster doesn’t understand the impulse to get up and wander after an injury; the first time Myles ever yelled at him was over just such an occurrence, and it was the first time Jaster decided he liked the man. With a quiet snort, Jaster shakes his head. “There’s nothing to forgive,” he says, “beyond the strain on yourself. Here. Arms around my neck.”

Jon pauses, looking almost wary. “I can walk,” he says.

Unimpressed, Jaster raises a brow at him. “The medics said tomorrow you may _put_ your feet on the floor,” he says. “Until then, I refuse to help you break their rules. Let me carry you back to bed.”

There's a long, long hesitation as Jon searches Jaster's face for something that he apparently doesn’t find. “All right,” he allows finally. “Thank you.”

“It’s not the first time,” Jaster points out, amused, and Jon leans in, carefully, warily sliding his arms around Jaster's neck. With the way he’s sitting, it’s easy enough for Jaster to get his arms under him, to rise with Jon in his grip, and there's a sharp, pained breath in his ear that says Jon isn't nearly healed enough to be up. He buries his face in Jaster's collarbone, breathing rough and ragged, but Jaster doesn’t protest. Jon is long-limbed, muscular, but thinner than he should be. It’s lean muscle, pared down to _just_ muscle to the point that Jaster might call it dangerous, but it makes him easier to carry than Jaster would have expected of a man of his size.

Jon doesn’t seem to have an answer to that, and Jaster doesn’t push. Just carries him across the room, then carefully, gently eases him down onto the bed, in the middle of the tangle of blankets. Pulls them up, methodical, not letting his eyes linger anywhere in particular, and covers Jon fully. The medics warned of the beginnings of frostbite, and Jaster's taken care not to let him get too cold since he was released from the medical bay.

“If you want a book,” he says, taking a seat on the side of the bed, “I can find you one that’s much more interesting than what you were reading. I've struggled with that one myself.”

“It wasn’t bad,” Jon says, pulling the blankets up a little higher. His gaze flickers towards the table in the corner, then back to Jaster, like he’s waiting for a reaction.

Whatever it is he’s expecting, Jaster simply raises a brow at him. “I've encountered sand that’s less dry,” he says blandly.

There's the faintest flicker of humor across Jon's face, the reluctant curl of a smile pulling at one edge of his mouth. “I've read worse,” is all he says, though.

He’s a Jedi, so Jaster isn't precisely surprised that their texts are as dull as they tend to be. “Yes, well, I hold my books to a higher standard than the Jedi Order does, apparently. What would you prefer? Books on smithing, on history, on politics? I'm afraid my tastes tend towards nonfiction, but I believe Arla enjoys adventure novels, if you would like those.”

There's a long, long pause, but not the kind that says Jon is torn between his vast array of reading choices. He’s watching Jaster, and Jaster watches him in return, thinking again that Jon looks as wary as a wild animal in a trap, caught amidst the trappings of the cozy room but not used to them. Not what he would expect from a Jedi Knight, certainly.

“I would like,” Jon says, low and careful, “to know what—what you're going to want from me.”

Jaster stops, a little surprised. Meets Jon's gaze, and—that wariness is a sharp thing, edged with resignation. Which isn't a surprise, or shouldn’t be, because Jaster has told him nothing, pulled him off a battlefield and immediately set things in motion around him, but not _with_ him. Understandable, perhaps, given his injuries at the time, and easily fixed, at the very least.

“Forgive me,” Jaster says quietly, and can't help but reach out. Jon's hair is in his eyes again, and rather than simply brushing it back, Jaster smooths his fingers through the strands, then collects them in his grip, braiding them back. “Montross injured Jango more than a week ago, and this is the first time I've seen him conscious. My thoughts were elsewhere, and I apologize.”

Jon closes his eyes, and Jaster can feel the way he swallows. “I can fight,” he says. “But I won't—I won't break my oaths as a Jedi. Killing the innocent, or executing the unarmed, or—”

It is, Jaster thinks ruefully, an entirely reasonable conclusion to come to, given what Jon knows. “I wouldn’t ask you to break such oaths,” he says. “The True Mandalorians are mercenaries, not savages. And as skilled as I have no doubt you are, my Knight, I had a different plan in mind for you.” He settles the braid Jon's hair, then sits back, offering Jon his hands, and when Jon takes them warily, Jaster pulls him up to sit, steadies him with a hand on his side.

“A different plan,” Jon repeats, careful. His voice is still a little tight, but more with confusion now, Jaster thinks.

Jaster inclines his head. “I want you to marry me,” he says simply. “Killing Montross when I claimed his death means you owe me your life in forfeit. I would have you tie that life to mine, and be my spouse.”

Jon stares at him, frozen, eyes wide. There's no other response, though, and after a moment Jaster snorts. “You wouldn’t be obligated to perform marital duties,” he says dryly. “I am not that much of a bastard, regardless of my reputation. But I would ask for your presence at formal events, and that you return to my side whenever you are not called on missions.”

“But— _why_?” Jon says, bewildered. He pulls away, just a little, and it looks like he wants to slide out of bed, but Jaster reaches out and catches his elbow before he can. “I'm—you’ll gain nothing.”

“I gain a warrior as a spouse,” Jaster corrects. “And a tie to the Jedi Order, regardless of how distant. And _you_ gain reinforcements in whatever tasks you are required in, and the resources of the Mand’alor behind you. It will not be without benefit on both sides.”

Jon doesn’t answer, just stares at him, and Jaster huffs out an amused breath. Of course a mention of _marriage_ would break a Jedi. “Even if you refuse to have anything to do with the matter,” he says, sitting back to start unlacing his boots, “I _will_ put your name beside mine on a marriage certificate. But I would much rather have your actual presence than just your name. Should you truly find me impossible to coexist with, however, I will not object if you wish to flee into the night once you're well again.”

There's a long, long stretch of silence, but Jaster lets it lie as he strips off his shirt and pants, then rises to find his sleeping pants. When he makes his way back to the bed, Jon has his head dipped, hiding his face behind the fall of his messy hair on one side. The other side, braided into the rest of his hair, leaves his face bare, and Jaster pauses there, watching him. Jon's eyes are closed, his face oddly blank, but after several moments he lifts his head, and pale eyes catch Jaster's without hesitation.

“I’ll stay,” Jon says, soft, and Jaster smiles.

“Good,” he says. “And stay _there_ , or my medics will be cross with me.” He folds the blankets back, settling on the bed, and pointedly ignores it when Jon goes stiff. “Sleeping in the same bed won't go against the Jedi Order’s moral standards, I assume?”

Jon swallows, fingers knotting in the covers. “No,” he says, like it’s rote. “Jedi aren’t celibate.” Another long pause, and he slides down, curls up with his back to Jaster, and—

Well, Jaster thinks, raising an amused brow. Perhaps Jedi aren’t, but at the very least he gets the feeling that Jon hasn’t bedded down with many people, even just for sleeping.

“Good night, Jon,” he says, and there's a low, rough breath. Jon's fingers curl in the blanket, tighten, release.

“Good night,” he says in return, so soft that Jaster almost misses it.

“The wedding will be soon,” Jaster says, in the interest of full disclosure. “As soon as I can get arrangements in place. We can discuss it more in the morning.”

Jon nods, dark hair tangled on the pillow, and Jaster sighs a little, reaching out. He strokes the dark strands, knuckles grazing Jon's cheek, then turns away. Reaches for his own book, waiting on the nightstand, and opens it. There's no protest from Jon, no request to immediately turn out the light, and for now, Jaster will take it. They can discuss it further in the future, if need be.

For now, Jon is still and quiet on the other side of the bed, curled around his injury like he’s protecting himself, and Jaster lets him be, regretting the edge of guilt that bites at his chest, but—

Not enough to give up the advantage that was dropped into his lap. Not enough to alter his plans. This is for his people, and for the sake of their worlds. He can't afford to turn back now.


	3. Chapter 3

Exhaustion drags Jon into sleep in the midst of a tangled web of worry and confusion so sharp that he thinks he’ll never sleep again, and he wakes to the sound of a heartbeat close to his ear.

There's no uncertainty about where he is this time; Jon opens his eyes already knowing precisely where he is, whose heartbeat it is. Something cold streaks through him, and he freezes even as his vision comes into focus. There's a body on top of him, curled around him, a leg between his, an arm wrapped around his waist, and—

Jon has never been this close to another person without exchanging blows.

He closes his eyes, tries to breathe evenly, but all he can think about is the heat of Jaster's skin, overwhelming and so present that Jon can't focus on anything else. Jaster's breath is warm against the nape of his neck, and there's a big hand splayed across his stomach, right where his wound is. The steady beat of Jaster's heart, the quiet peace of his mind, is strangely unsettling, on the edge of overwhelming, and Jon can't move, can't even begin to think how to react.

Jaster shifts, breathes out with a soft groan, and he shifts over Jon, knee sliding up between his legs. It makes Jon jolt, and there’s heat pooling in his stomach even though there shouldn’t be. He drags in a ragged breath, digging his fingers into the mattress, but Jaster is halfway on top of him, and Jon can feel every inch of him, pressed right up against Jon's back. The hand on his stomach shifts, stroking lightly, and Jaster hums against his skin, like he’s eminently pleased to be where he is.

 _I want you to marry me_.

The words echo, alarming in how unexpected they were, entirely bewildering in how little Jon knows how to take them. He stares down, not able to focus on anything but Jaster, vision filled with the sight of Jaster's arm wrapped around him, and—

He doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean.

Lying around in bed isn't something Jon has ever done, and that doesn’t help, either. It’s soft, and warm, and that heartbeat echoes through Jon's body, steady but certain. He wants to crawl out of bed and run, wants to vanish into the predawn light, but at the same time Jon isn't sure he would be able to bring himself to move even if he could.

He feels _good_ right now. It’s been a very long time since he felt like this.

A little guiltily, a little furtively, Jon shifts. Slow, careful, but he settles back a little more tightly into the curve of Jaster's body, lets their legs tangle more comfortably. It’s _warm_. Feeling another person this close leaves Jon almost shaky, makes him _want_ deep in the pit of his stomach even if he can't put that desire into words, and he just wants to stay where he is for a short while longer. Shouldn’t, and he knows it, but—

With a low sound, Jaster's arm tightens around him, and he presses his forehead to Jon's shoulder, breathes out. Hot breath on his spine makes Jon shiver despite himself, and he freezes, feeling hunted, _caught_.

But there's no instant recoil from Jaster. Just a pause, a slip of fingers across Jon's skin that makes him bite down on the inside of his cheek to contain a reaction, and a quiet huff, soft in the cool stillness of the air.

“Well,” Jaster says, and his voice is low, amused. It curls down Jon's spine like a physical touch, a lick of heat that lodges beneath his skin. “I see you stayed put for almost eight hours. I'm impressed.”

Jon breathes out, tries desperately to drag some sort of ability to speak out of the tangle in his chest. “You seem to be making sure of that,” he says hoarsely, and Jaster snorts. He pushes up, and Jon has to swallow the sharp sound to protest that wants to escape as body heat is replaced with cold, as Jaster pulls away. His breath knots in his throat, and he has to contain himself so he doesn’t reach out, doesn’t pull Jaster back. staying where he is seems like the best bet, for all that it feels like loss.

Greed, Jon thinks, closing his eyes, and there's something like despair eating away beneath his breastbone. He can't—he’s a Jedi. He can't _want_ like that. It’s wrong. If his Master knew—

Fingers in his hair make him startle, jarred out of his thoughts, and he glances up to find Jaster leaning over him, dark eyes entirely focused on Jon. He smooths Jon's hair back, then says, “The medics will likely want to see you at some point today, to be sure you’re still healing well. And my aide, Myles, will start on arrangements today as well.”

Arrangements. For their marriage. Jon swallows, and—he has no idea how to feel. It’s not being used as a weapon against innocents, or even being set against the Order, like he’d feared, but—he’s not sure what it _is_. Not attachment, because he doesn’t know Jaster, but something a step to the side of that.

But then, Jon killed Montross even knowing that the Mand’alor had claimed his death. He accepted the price, and gave his word, and that leaves him uncertain, floundering. The Force says to stay, isn't pulling him away or warning him of danger, and for now, there's nothing to do but accept that he’s supposed to be here.

“All right,” Jon says quietly, and carefully eases himself up as Jaster slides out of bed. It’s hard to look away, hard not to let his gaze sweep over Jaster's form in what should be an assessment of threats but isn't. Instead, Jon's eyes linger on the way his loose sleeping pants sit low on his hips, the breadth of his back and shoulders. Jaster is a big man, with the muscles of a man used to fighting in heavy full-body armor, and scarred. Not as thoroughly as Jon, but—

_You’ve lived a warrior’s life. The map of it stays on your skin, as it should._

With an effort, Jon drags his eyes away, drops his gaze. “My clothes,” he says. “Are they…”

Jaster pulls a loose tunic on, then turns, and Jon feels hot under his gaze, even though it’s only assessing. “They were unsalvageable,” he says. “I had my people keep them, however, in case you wanted them. I’ll have someone find you a set to wear until you can choose your own.”

“Thank you,” Jon says, careful. “You didn’t have to do that, but—thank you.”

Jaster raises a brow at him, stripping off his pants, and Jon truly has to look away then. “They're yours,” he says simply. “I know what I'm forcing you into, Jon, but I try not to erase free will and trample on others’ property.”

The breath rasps in Jon's throat, and he reaches up to tuck his hair back behind one ear. It’s as if he can still feel Jaster's touch there, hot against his fingertips even now, and it’s…unnerving.

“After the—marriage,” he manages. “You won't—I’ll still be called. On missions.”

“And I will still take mercenary jobs,” Jaster says, unbothered. “I don’t expect you to cease being a Jedi, as I would hope you wouldn’t expect me to cease being Mand’alor. We both have our duties.” He settles the tunic, rolling up the sleeves and says, “You won't be a prisoner, just a spouse.”

Jon doesn’t say he has no idea where the difference lies.

“Thank you,” he says again, quiet, and twists an edge of the blankets between his fingers. It’s easy to doubt, to worry, to question, but—this is where the Force wants him. Slowly, carefully, he breathes out, then pulls his legs up to cross them beneath him. His stomach twinges sharply, and he catches his breath on a wince, pressing his hand to it for a brief moment before he remembers himself and drops it again. Telegraphing weakness is something he should know better than to do, especially in an uncertain situation.

A hand catches his before he can drop it entirely, though, and Jaster lean in, a gentle hand on Jon's shoulder tiling him backwards just a little. Jon freezes, feeling vulnerable, exposed, like Jaster could lash out and eviscerate him with a single blow, but—

There's no hostility, no cunning in Jaster's mind. Just concern, light but honest, and Jon forces himself not to wrench away, fold over to protect himself. Jaster brushes his fingers across Jon's stomach, right where his hand was resting when he was asleep, and he frowns faintly.

“The scar tissue has faded enough that you shouldn’t have a problem moving as long as you’re slow,” he says. “Out into the garden, perhaps.”

Jon's entirely ready to go outside, even if it’s brief, and he nods. Watches as Jaster retrieves the bacta, spreading it across his fingers, and tries not to flinch when he starts to stroke it into Jon's skin. There's a moment of silence that itches uncomfortable, and Jon grimaces a little to himself, then asks, “Do you…need anything from me? For the marriage.”

Jaster pauses, considering. His mind is a quick thing, but careful, considering several responses and setting them aside. “I would like to have the ceremony finished quickly,” he says. “So if you're hoping to summon witnesses, or friends, it should be done today.”

Jon goes stiff, almost jerking back from Jaster's touch. The only person he could conceivably ask would be his Master, and just the _thought_ drives a spear of ice right through Jon's bones.

“No,” he says, more sharply than he means to. Catching himself, he restrains a wince, and says more evenly, “I—there isn't anyone. Will that…change things?”

“No,” Jaster says, straightening, and his attention is a heavy thing as he watches Jon, recapping the bacta. “I can have Myles stand as your witness, if you would like, while Jango or Arla stands as mine. A Mandalorian’s family is what that Mandalorian makes of it, so there are very few unbendable rules.”

Relief shakes through Jon's chest, and he inclines his head in thanks, trying not to consider it a narrow escape. If he _did_ have to tell Dark Woman, he can't even begin to imagine her reaction.

“I would appreciate that,” he says quietly. “Thank you.”

Jaster inclines his head. “I’ll ask him,” he says, and smiles when there’s a knock at the door. “Myles, come in.”

The door opens, and a stocky, muscular Korun man with wildly curly hair cropped close to his skull leans in. He’s not in armor, but he’s carrying a datapad and a bundle of cloth tucked under one arm, and a tray balanced on one hand.

“You breakfast, Mand’alor,” he says, dry, and Jaster snorts.

“You would never bring me my breakfast, Myles,” he counters.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Myles admits without hesitation. “The medical droid and the cooks conspired to make sure your captive eats something other than bread and water, though.”

Jaster frowns, and a touch of indignation flares. “Myles, he’s not—”

Myles rolls his eyes, but his gaze falls to Jon, and he eases through the door, then crosses the room with quick steps. “You look better, Jedi,” he says, and it’s mildly wary, watchful, but also steady and unalarmed. “When the Mand’alor brought you in, I thought you were a corpse.”

“Thank you for taking care of me regardless,” Jon says, low, and dips his head. When he raises it, Myles is looking at the braid holding one side of his hair back, and his brow arches. Jon goes hot with a feeling that’s not quite _caught_ , but manages to come close, but before he can say anything, Myles sets the tray down on the table beside the bed, then drops the bundle of cloth into Jon's lap.

“Clothes,” he says. “I don’t know what you prefer besides Jedi robes, but I had the tailor find something in roughly the right size while she makes you a new set of tunics.”

“Thank you,” Jon says, caught off guard by the consideration. He picks up the first piece of cloth, and—it’s soft. So soft it catches on the calluses on his hands, and he wants to drop it again, to keep from tearing it or getting it dirty. Hesitation curls through him, and he breathes in, then says quietly, “I—is there a fresher?”

“Of course,” Jaster says, and offers Jon his arm. Jon eyes it for a moment, but when Jaster makes no other move, he carefully hooks his fingers around it and lets Jaster help him to his feet as he wraps one of the blankets around his waist. Standing is easier than it was yesterday, and he lets out a breath of relief, straightening cautiously. Jaster doesn’t actively hold him up, but he watches Jon for a long moment before he says, “Let me help you there.”

For a moment, Jon thinks about arguing, but—he likely does need the help, particularly if he’s going to be standing for enough time to get himself clean. With a silent nod, he lets Jaster get an arm around his waist, and—

It’s too close. Jaster is fully dressed, but Jon can still feel the heat of his body, the imprint of the hand against his hip. Jaster is pressed up against him completely, and Jon is a few centimeters taller but Jaster is _solid_ , an immovable support as he guides Jon's steps across the floor. Jon can't pull away, and he can hardly think of anything but Jaster, the pace of his own heart, the way Jaster's fingers splay across his waist. It’s a simple thing, just another body, and it shouldn’t be overwhelming, but it _is_.

Jon doesn’t think he’s ever had someone help him like this. Maybe—maybe years ago, on one of the rare occasions Dark Woman ran a joint mission with another Master, but—he can hardly even remember that, and it certainly didn’t feel like this.

“Here,” Jaster says, and a hand on the panel has the door sliding open soundlessly. The fresher is large, and there's a set of sonics alongside a real water shower, a deep tub set into the floor. “Use whatever you like. This whole section of the compound has been sitting empty for years, though, so be patient with it.” A pause, and he watches Jon for a moment, then says, “And with yourself as well. You were shot six times at close range. Things may move quickly, but you hardly need to.”

“Thank you,” Jon says roughly, pulling away, and Jaster lets him go without argument. He backs out, and the door slides shut behind him, leaving Jon standing in the middle of the cold room, wrapped in a borrowed blanket and still clutching clothes entirely unlike his familiar, much-patched robes.

Jon breathes in, breathes out. He folds down to his knees, bowing his head, and reaches for meditation, for the Force, trying desperately to see if he’s made a mistake, because none of this can be right. He can't be feeling this way. He can't be _meant_ to stay here.

But the Force is quiet, calm. The threads that have always guided Jon's steps are coiled and quiescent around this building. Around _Jaster_ , most of all.

No matter what Jon might want to assume, he’s meant to be in this place. He has a task here, now, with this man and these people.

Jon just wishes that he could know what it is with the same certainty that he knows it exists.

“Of all the things you’ve asked me to do,” Myles says, “ _including_ sneaking into the Jedi Archives—”

“I didn’t ask you to _sneak in_ , I wanted you to ask about their policy of lending to those outside the Temple—” Jaster starts, offended by the implication.

“You wanted me to ask as a _Korun_ ,” Myles points out, unimpressed. “I think that counts as sneaking, sir.”

It is not, Jaster admits, entirely dissimilar. He huffs, annoyed at the memory, and folds his arms. “Not that it _worked_. That Jedi witch can sniff out a Mandalorian better than a bloodhound.”

Myles doesn’t quite roll his eyes, but Jaster can tell he wants to. “Still. Even including that, asking me to organize a formal wedding for the _Mand’alor_ in less than two weeks, even on a reduced scale, is a high bar.”

“That’s what you have a jetpack for,” Jaster points out, and when Myles scowls at him, he snorts, amused. “If it can't be done, Myles, that’s perfectly acceptable. We can simply sign the documents in front of witnesses and spread the news another way.”

“You always have to be _reasonable_ ,” Myles says, a mild complaint, and holds up his datapad. “I _can_ do it. Probably. But you're going to make the heads of every New Mandalorian explode simultaneously.”

“Good,” Jaster says dismissively. The Kalevalan faction of the New Mandalorians has been a thorn in his side since the moment he started trying to unite the warrior clans, and it’s only gotten worse over the years with the Death Watch’s actions. Jaster understands, intellectually, the desire for peace and pacifism, but he will never understand the urge to give up every aspect of Mandalorian culture and wipe away millennia of history just to be able to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore the rest of the galaxy.

Myles’s smile is crooked. “Agreed, but it’s still something you're going to have to deal with eventually, sir. Allying the Jedi and the Mandalorian clans isn't a move any Mand’alor has made in a long time.”

Jaster grimaces, sinking down in the chair in the corner and rubbing his face. “This civil war has been going on for far too long, Myles. More than half of Jango and Arla's lives has been spent fighting the Death Watch, and the periods of peace keep getting shorter. If we can finally bring an end to Tor Vizsla’s reign of terror over our system, even the blasted Kalevalans can't complain.”

“Of course they can. They're just going to have to find something _different_ to complain about.” Myles glances down at his pad, then takes a seat on top of a weapons chest along the wall. “I'm putting Arla in charge of security, and leaving everything there up to her, so if you have any concerns, bring them to her. And if you want to hold the wedding here, you're going to have to convince the governor to stop calling you a felon on Concord Dawn. She won't listen to _me_.”

Jaster wants to do that _very_ little, but—it’s well past time he addresses the matter. Her position has kept Concord Dawn more or less neutral since the war started, particularly in the early days right after Jaster claimed his title, but no more. He’s had enough of the back-handed support while she also plays nice with the Death Watch.

“Very well,” he says grimly. “I’ll comm her tomorrow. Anything else?”

Myles makes a thoughtful sound. “Well, I was thinking I would put Jango in charge of the decorations—”

Jaster sighs through his nose, trying to hide his amusement. “This is nothing but revenge, and I did nothing to deserve it.”

“With all due respect, Mand’alor, you told me you were marrying a Jedi two days ago, while the Jedi was still unconscious in our cruiser’s medbay,” Myles says, and that tone means Jaster is lucky to have escaped that conversation with his dignity intact. “If this _was_ revenge, I’d be entirely justified.”

Jaster chuckles, raising his hands. “Very well, I can't argue with that. Was there _actually_ anything else?”

Myles pauses, and his gaze flickers to the fresher door, then slides back to Jaster. “I thought this was just political,” he says after a moment.

A little bemused by this line of questioning, Jaster raises a brow. “It is,” he confirms. “Though I expect at _least_ half of the Supercommandos will take it as me finally hitting my midlife crisis.”

Myles actually laughs at that, and he’s grinning when he says, “You’ve still got forty years to go before you're middle-aged, sir. But they're definitely going to assume that you aren’t thinking with your big brain.”

Jaster sighs, already more than able to imagine the teasing. “Jango and Arla both seem to think I’ve lost my mind, so I’ll assume that’s an improvement.”

“They're both very clever,” Myles says placidly. “Has the Jedi told you his name yet, or am I filling out his portion of the paperwork with a question mark?”

“Jon Antilles,” Jaster says, bland, and when Myles gives him a disbelieving look, he tips his head. “I believe he’s telling the truth.”

Wrinkling his nose, Myles makes a note on his pad. “ _Jetii_ ,” he mutters, and then asks, “You’ll have your armor, for the ceremony. Robes, for him? To make it clear he’s a Jedi?”

Jaster makes to answer, then pauses. Jon's reaction when Jaster said they had saved his tattered old robes is easy enough to remember, and it’s a simple thing to keep going. “Let him choose. I have no doubt the tailor will have more than enough ideas to overwhelm him.”

There's a pause as Myles regards him closely. “I'm sure she will,” he says. “You realize I'm going to ask Arla to do that, right?”

“I assumed,” Jaster says dryly, “seeing as you have no respect.”

“It’s sympathy I don’t have,” Myles counters. “You have my full respect, Mand’alor, as always, but none of my sympathy.” He makes another note, then pauses, and says, “If this is just because you think you finally found a foolproof way to get past the Jedi's librarian—”

He’s laughing at Jaster. Jaster knows it perfectly well, and he sighs, aggrieved, as Myles fights not to laugh. “She’s an Archivist, and access to the Archives, should I receive it, is a happy accident on the way to consolidating the True Mandalorians’ power.”

“Of course,” Myles says tolerantly. “How many guests for the Jedi?”

Jaster pauses, and the look on Jon's face when he asked is still all too clear, something like fear that surfaced for a bare instant before he locked it away again. “None,” he says, and Myles casts a glance at the fresher door but doesn’t comment.

“I checked those names you sent me,” he says instead. “The Fire Hand Gang has tripled in size in the last few years, and no one can tell where their credit flow is coming from. They're primarily drug runners, though, and they keep to themselves, so no one’s looked too closely.”

No one but a lone Jedi, operating in the Outer Rim, Jaster thinks, and sighs. “If Vizsla is contracting with gangs for supplies and weaponry, it will be a blasted nightmare tracking down all of them,” he says. “I'm sure the Fire Hands aren’t the only ones working with him.”

“They're not,” Jon says, quiet, and Jaster turns, startled by the complete lack of previous noise—

And stops, unable to look away.

The tunic and pants Myles brought are just a little too tight, a touch too small. They _cling_ , and the sight shouldn’t be somehow more intriguing than Jon stripped bare, but—this is the promise of taking the offending clothing _off_ again. Jaster sweeps a look over Jon, not quite able to help himself, and finds himself entirely focused on the way Jon's wet hair curls just a little where it falls against the green cloth.

“Jon,” he says, and finally remembers himself enough to push to his feet, crossing the room to slide an arm around Jon's waist. There are scars beneath his touch, clear where the shirt rides up, and Jaster can't help but drag his thumb along one as he settles his grip. The way Jon shivers is a gratifying thing, and the sideways flicker of a glance from pale blue eyes catches Jaster's attention in a way nothing has done in a long while.

“Feel better?” he asks, soft, and Jon swallows, leaning into Jaster's body for half an instant before he pulls away again.

“Much,” Jon says roughly, and Jaster lowers him into his own chair and pauses. He can't resist the urge to brush a few of those wet strands of hair back, can't help the way the dip of Jon's dark lashes captivates him. The urge to reach up and smooth his fingers across the scar that cuts across his brow is strong—

“Do you know the names of the other ones?” Myles asks, and the question jars Jaster out of his distraction. He straightens, frowning, and Jon flicks a glance at him for half a second before he focuses on Myles.

“Only two,” he answers, “and one crew where I couldn’t find evidence of a connection, but I'm sure they're working for the Death Watch. News of Montross interrupted my mission, though. My comm has all of my notes.”

“Montross was certainly skilled at upsetting things,” Jaster agrees grimly, leaning against the edge of the chair. “I believe the comm is still with your old robes.”

“I’ll go to get it myself,” Myles promises, and rises. “Mand’alor. Jedi Knight Antilles.”

The expression that flickers across Jon's face is almost bemused, but before Jaster can ask about the reason, Jon pushes up, getting his feet under him with obvious effort. His balance wavers as he makes it upright, and Jaster catches him automatically, holding him on his feet.

“I think the garden will have to wait,” he says. “Bed, for now, and food. The medics will be by shortly, I have no doubt, and Myles will be back with your comm in a moment.”

Dark hair falls over the nape of Jon's neck as his head dips, and Jaster finds his attention caught again, this time by the sharp line of Jon's jaw, the arch of his brow, the new absence of stubble. Still not pretty, but—striking, Jaster thinks is an appropriate word.

“Something is going to happen here,” Jon says quietly, and his eyes are fixed ahead of them, but his voice doesn’t waver. “Not—dark. But something large.”

Cold prickles down Jaster's spine. He’s never been entirely sure what parts of the Jedi's abilities are spacer tales and what parts are grounded in truth, but—

This, he thinks as he watches Jon raise his head, as he meets pale blue eyes that are full of nothing but honesty. This might be one of the more unsettling abilities, if it is one.


	4. Chapter 4

There isn't enough information.

Jon frowns at his comm, at the glowing display of all the notes he made while he was with the Fire Hand gang or researching their ties. Shorthand, coded, carefully tucked away amidst unrelated files, and Myles had handed it over without hesitation in a way that made Jon's stomach twist a little.

The Mandalorians and the Jedi have been enemies for centuries. He wasn’t expecting belief and help from them, regardless of the fact that he’s marrying the Mand’alor.

Reaching out, Jon taps a finger against the display, flicks it sideways as a list of names rises to replace it. After a moment, he pulls up another, all the past and current members of the Fire Hands that he could find mention of, and pauses there, studying both listings, trying to feel out any connections. They exist, and he’s sure of that, but seeing them takes a clear mind and a lack of expectation, and right now his head is just fuzzy enough to make it hard to concentrate.

The Blue Rose Syndicate, he thinks, rubbing a hand over his eyes as he ducks his head. Two members from the Blue Rose joined the Fire Hand, but—years apart. There's no proof that the Blue Rose is involved in supplying the Death Watch, and they mostly operate in the Inner Rim and the Core, but—

Jon has a feeling. An itching, unignorable feeling when he looks at those two names on the list. The Needles give him the same feeling, even though they're supposedly opposed to the Death Watch, have had spats with the members before. When Jon closes his eyes, the links are there, waiting, obvious.

Now he just has to prove them in the physical world.

Reaching out, Jon slides his finger across the roster, trying to focus on nothing but his breathing, but it’s hard. His whole chest still aches, and there's a pull in his gut that says he’s not nearly as healed as he would like to be. Montross fought hard, and Jon had to take more hits than he thought to get close enough to kill him. It was worth it, because Montross had hurt too many people, needed to be put down, but—

Jon closes his eyes, presses a hand over his stomach and tries to breathe through the pain. He’s used to the hurt, and this shouldn’t be enough to fog his thoughts. He should be better than this.

But it’s all so unfamiliar. This quiet room, the peace of the land outside, the ease of all the thoughts around him. There's a sense of discipline, of caution, but no one here is angry or alarmed or on edge, and Jon never stays in peaceful places. There's always somewhere else to go, always something else to do, always a sense in the Force pulling him onward.

Not now, though. Jon is supposed to be here, right where he is.

Breathing out, Jon opens his eyes, studying the list for another moment, then reaching out. He highlights a name in the Blue Rose column, but there's no thread to follow, no sense of certainty attached. Just that one name, and Jon pulls back, pressing the knuckle of his thumb to his lips as he considers. He should—

There's a knock on the door, loud and insistent, so unexpected that it makes Jon startle. He jerks around to look at it, then hesitates, not sure what to do. Jaster is gone, got dragged away by Myles earlier, and this is his room. Letting someone else in seems…rude.

Again, impatient, the knock sounds. “Open up, Jedi,” a woman’s voice calls. “I know you're in there.”

Oh, Jon thinks, and closes his eyes for a brief moment, letting out a breath. That’s what this is.

“One moment,” he says, loud enough to carry, and the knocking stops as the woman snorts. Carefully, gingerly, Jon shuts off the comm and eases himself off the bed, grimacing as he comes to his feet, but—the exhaustion from keeping himself alive on the battlefield is still heavy in his bones, and healing himself seems like an impossible task right now. He just has to deal with the pain until he’s a little more recovered.

Making it to the door takes longer than he wants to admit, and Jon has to brace himself against the wall for a moment once he gets there, head spinning faintly. After a second, though, he reaches out, opening the door, and blinks at the figure on the other side.

Tall and broad-shouldered, wearing black armor decorated with white and bearing a stylized red mythosaur skull, the woman waiting in the hall raises a brow at him, a sweep of her eyes taking him in from head to toe. “You're a Jedi?” she asks, sounding skeptical. “I didn’t think they came in _vagabond_.”

Jon wishes for his robes, his cloak, something to hide behind, but since he doesn’t have them, he lifts his chin, meeting her eyes. “You’re a Mandalorian?” he counters. “I didn’t think they came in blonde.”

Surprise flickers over her face, and she snorts loudly, tipping her head. “I have bad news for you about the Kalevalans, then,” she says dryly, uncrossing her arms. “I'm Arla Fett.”

The adopted daughter of the Mand’alor, Jon thinks, a little surprised, and takes a step back. “Jon Antilles,” he returns, and Arla takes advantage of the gap to push into the room. She sets her helmet on the chest by the door with an air of complete familiarity, then turns, studying Jon again. Jon doesn’t let it move him, doesn’t react as he closes the door and steps back to lean against it, not sure how much longer his legs will hold him but not willing to sit down and be so clearly vulnerable in front of a stranger.

“Jedi Knight Jon Antilles,” Arla says, like it’s a test.

Jon has no idea why they all seem to think he’s a Knight and not a Master, but it’s both a little amusing and a little relieving to realize that they haven’t managed to find the Order’s records of him. What records there are, at least; Dark Woman very carefully made sure that there were few references to him in the Archives, and even fewer ways people could find him. Still, Knight tends to be used as a very general sort of title for any Jedi, among those who don’t know them better, and Jon isn't about to correct the misconception.

“Yes,” he allows, and Arla sighs a little, the curve of her mouth something rueful.

“Well,” she says. “At least Jaster didn’t drag home another half-dead dire-cat. A Jedi is probably an improvement.”

Jon blinks, caught off guard. “A…dire-cat?” he asks.

With a snort, Arla steps forward, circling around to the side of him as she watches him closely. “Jaster tends to like dangerous things,” she says, “even when they turn around and bite him.” There's a sharp flicker, a wash of something like self-recrimination that spikes across her emotions, tired and a little angry but worn with age. “And now he’s _marrying_ the dangerous thing he dragged home, apparently.”

Jon doesn’t move, doesn’t react. He doesn’t need to be watching her to be aware of her intent, and right now she’s not a threat. Dangerous, but—she’s Mandalorian. It’s to be expected.

“It was the price,” he says quietly. “I knew killing Montross would have a cost, but I chose to do it anyway.”

Arla is quiet for a moment, and then makes a sound of quiet amusement. “And I'm glad you did,” she says. When Jon slants her a wary look, she shakes her head, then takes a few steps back, sinking down into one of the chairs by the window. There's a book on the table, the one Jaster was reading last night, and she runs her fingers over the cover, then says without looking up, “Montross was responsible for leading Jaster and my brother both into an ambush on Kordia IV, before they knew he was a traitor. He was angry that Jango and I had gotten positions as squad leaders for the mission, and he almost got Jaster killed. Jango and I were able to save him, but—Montross needed to die for it.”

That tone is dispassionate, flat. Jon can feel that she means it, that there’s no hesitation in her, no waver in her belief. And—it’s confusing in a different way than Jaster's certainty in the same matter, because Jaster is Mand’alor. He’s responsible for all of the True Mandalorians, has a duty to the whole movement, and it makes sense that he would take the actions of Montross, who was seeking to harm them, as an offense that merited death.

Arla doesn’t have that same duty, though. This is her response to her family being attacked, echoing the same bloody-minded ferocity as the Mand’alor protecting his whole system, and that’s…almost unsettling.

“He was targeting civilians,” Jon says in quiet explanation. “The Order tries not to involve itself in Mandalorian affairs, but I couldn’t stand by and watch.”

Arla's eyes narrow, thoughtful as she watches him, and she leans back in her chair, stripping her gauntlets off deliberately. “It wasn’t an assigned mission,” she says, like that’s a test, too.

Jon shakes his head. He thinks about telling her he goes where the Force leads, not where the Order tells him, but—he doesn’t know how a Mandalorian would take that kind of thing, so he keeps it to himself.

“He seemed more important than the gang I had infiltrated,” he says quietly.

One of Arla's brows rises, and there's sharp interest on her face. “Infiltration?” she asks. “That’s your specialty?”

There isn't really a good way to classify himself. Jon hesitates, considering, and then finally shakes his head. “Some of everything,” he says. “But I…usually work alone.” An understatement, but he lets it stand. “Infiltration is easier, like that.”

Arla hums, mild and uninflected, but Jon can read her rueful amusement clearly. “Well,” she says. “The fact that you're used to acting might help with all of this. I’m supposed to take you to see the tailor as soon as possible. The medical droid get done with you yet, or are we waiting on her?”

“She was here,” Jon says, and considers how he feels, the distance to the bed and how he’s hesitating just to cross that much ground. Breathes out, and says, “I won't be…moving fast.”

“That’s why I'm here and Myles didn’t just give you directions.” Arla checks her comm, then rises to her feet, tucking her gauntlets through her belt. She pauses there, considering Jon with a weight behind her gaze, and then says, “I understand that this is my father’s plan, Jedi, and that you have other duties that demand your loyalty. But if you harm him in any way, I’ll show you precisely why Mandalorians are so good at killing Jedi.”

That dark ferocity vibrates through her words, even though they're steady. Protectiveness with a razor-sharp edge, furious and as solid as stone. It doesn’t waver, doesn’t bend, and Jon lets the heat of it curl around him and nods.

“I understand,” he says, and—that at least is true. He can understand what drives her to make the threat, the promise, can respect it.

Arla holds his gaze for another long moment, then nods curtly. She picks up her helmet, tucking it under one arm, and then moves towards Jon, deliberate and slow enough to make it clear this isn't part of the threat. “I can carry you the way Jaster does, but we might give the rest of the supercommandos the wrong idea,” she says dryly.

Jon grimaces faintly. Jaster picking him up when he’s half-dead, or too injured to move, is one thing, but resorting to that when he’s perfectly conscious and in public makes him want to cringe. “Something to lean on is enough,” he says, and shifts so that Arla can brace her body against his and pull his arm over her shoulders. The stretch makes him wince a little as they shuffle, trying to figure out how to move together, but he finally gets his feet under himself, letting Arla take some of his weight, and is relieved when it doesn’t hurt quite as much as standing upright on his own.

“First step accomplished,” Arla says dryly, blowing a strand of blonde hair that’s escaped from her braid out of her eyes. She’s still carrying her helmet, so Jon silently reaches out, opening the door, and she makes a sound of amusement, steering him out and kicking it shut behind them. “Thanks. What a way to get to know my future stepfather.”

Jon twitches, almost wants to duck away except he can't, and it ends up being a skittery spook like he’s a shying horse that almost overbalances them both. Arla yelps and drops her helmet, almost tripping, and just manages to catch them on the edge of decorative pedestal before they both hit the ground, her fingers hooked in the waistband of Jon's pants. He hisses at the wrench of movement as he’s caught, pain radiating bright across his nerves and almost buckling his knees. Arla gets an arm around his waist before they can, though, hauls him upright again, and there's a second of silence as she stares at him. Jon ducks his head, hiding as best he can behind the fall of his hair, but he can _feel_ the tide of her amusement rising, bright and effervescent.

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she asks, on the edge of merry, and the humor in her eyes is a wicked thing. “Less than two weeks until you're a _father_ , Jedi.”

“I—” Jon starts, and then stops short, head empty of absolutely any response. He closes his mouth and swallows, and Arla takes one look at his expression and _laughs_.

“Come on,” she says, and hitches him, up a little higher, grabbing her helmet from the floor and then dragging his arm over her shoulders again. “Jango's horrifying but he’s not _that_ horrifying. At least you got me, too.”

Jon grimaces, and not entirely from the pull of newly-healed skin as they forge ahead. “I—that wasn’t part of the deal,” he says, a little helplessly, and Arla snorts and pats his elbow consolingly.

“We’ve _always_ been part of the deal,” she says without sympathy. “Don’t worry, were already self-sufficient. If Jaster picks up any more foundlings, _those_ ones you can raise.”

“Only if you want them raised as _Jedi_ ,” Jon counters, though he’s honestly not even sure he could manage that much. He’s…bad with children.

Arla makes a thoughtful sound, slanting him a look, though she’s still smirking. “It’s a Mandalorian-trained Jedi who made the Darksaber, isn't it? Maybe a Jedi-trained Mandalorian could finally get it back from that bastard Tor.”

Jon blinks, startled. That was one legend that Dark Woman was entirely pleased to tell him, since she felt it proved several points. “You mean Tarre Vizsla,” he says. “The Darksaber is on Mandalore? It’s still in use?”

Arla blinks back at him. “You Jedi don’t know?” she asks, clearly equally surprised. “No one but Tor knows where it is, but it’s in the possession of Clan Vizsla. That’s one of the reasons the Death Watch has so many supporters. The Darksaber is supposed to mean that Clan Vizsla has the right to rule Mandalore.”

“It vanished from the Jedi Temple after Tarre’s death,” Jon says, frowning. “There have been rumors ever since, but—nothing that’s seemed reliable. My Master once spent two years looking into stories of it.”

Arla snorts. “Well, Mandalorians wouldn’t spill that kind of thing to a Jedi, so I'm not surprised she didn’t find anything.”

Jon is. If the truth existed, he would have expected Dark Woman to ferret it out of _someone_ , because she’s one of the best spies in the Order. But—it is a Mandalorian matter, and if Tarre Vizsla intended his clan to have it after his death, maybe something was lost between his intentions and the Order’s actions. They would have passed it on otherwise. And if he _didn’t_ —

Well. Something to look into. Though Jon doesn’t quite have an idea what he’ll do if it _was_ stolen from the Order.

“If the Death Watch is using it, I think I'm allowed to object, as a Jedi,” Jon says, and Arla grimaces in agreement.

“Given that Tor wants to conquer the galaxy? I think you're allowed to object as a _sentient_ ,” she says dryly. “All right, left here. It’s the fourth door on the right. Jaster didn’t give the seamstress any orders about clothing, but I'm supposed to keep you from wearing neon pink and gold to the wedding.”

Jon doesn’t quite pull a face, but it’s a close thing. “I can't wear my old robes?” he asks without much hope.

“The ones with the bloodstains? _Ha_.” Merciless, Arla hauls him towards the seamstress’s door. “Don’t look like that, someone’s going to think I'm taking you to an execution, not a fitting.”

Jon doesn’t say he would prefer the former, but from the way Arla laughs when she glances at him, it’s probably clear enough on his face.

  


  


“If that is _another_ guest list,” Jaster starts as the door opens, halfway to a threat.

Myles drops the datapad on his desk without so much as a pause. “You’ll take it and like it, Mand’alor,” he says dryly. “Since you're not the one who has to comm all of these people and ask them to rearrange their schedules at the last minute for an incredibly important event.”

With a sigh, Jaster sets aside the reports on Death Watch movements he was trying to make sense of and takes the other pad, glancing at the list and then immediately crossing out two names. They promptly flicker back to being un-crossed out, and Jaster stares at them for a long moment, then raises a brow.

“Some of them are non-negotiable,” Myles says patiently. “ _Including_ Clan Naast.”

Jaster grimaces. “Someone should have taught them that descent from a former Mand’alor does not give them the right to _remain_ Mand’alor two hundred years later,” he says, and crosses out another name. This one actually allows itself to be removed, and he breathes a quiet sigh of relief and quickly reads through the rest of the potential guests.

“Clan Naast’s _beskar_ mines are some of the most prolific in the system,” Myles says, though Jaster hardly needs a reminder when their clan leader makes sure to bring up that point every time they meet. “Be nice.”

Jaster scoffs quietly. He didn’t get the clans to follow him by being _nice_ , he did it by offering them a new way of living that fell in line with old values, and they respect him for that. Not for his ability to _politick_.

“Any updates from medical?” he asks, rather than try to make that point, because Myles very rarely has any sympathy for wounds that are self-inflicted.

“Before or after I caught Jango trying to browbeat the med-droid into releasing him early?” Myles asks dryly, and Jaster grimaces. “He’s fine. I told him not to try it again. Given how he looked like a tooka could have knocked him over, I think he’ll actually listen this time.”

Jaster shakes his head, though he’s not overly surprised. Jango likes to test his own limits, and then push beyond them. “And Jon?”

“Healing.” Myles is watching him, Jaster can feel it, but he doesn’t look up and acknowledge the gaze. “The med-droid seemed pleased with his progress, so I sent Arla to get him fitted.”

She took the news of the wedding well, at least. But then, Arla has an ability to focus on advantages and benefits to the exclusion of most other things, and it’s a fearsome one. As long as a connection to the Jedi is helping them, she’ll support it. Jango is…less focused on assets. Jaster is hoping that time in medical will give him the chance to come to terms with the news.

“Anything more on those supply lines to the Death Watch?” he asks, though that likely would have been the thing Myles led with if there was more information.

And, predictably, Myles shakes his head, folding his arms over his chest as he leans against the corner of the desk. “I left your Jedi looking over his notes, but I couldn’t read them, and he didn’t seem to have anything new.”

For a moment, Jaster considers the datapads on his desk, full of information from agents and allies and informants, things that no Jedi—no matter how well-informed—would have access to. There is always a hesitation about sharing too much, leaving his people vulnerable, but…

Stopping the Death Watch is more important. Jon swore his life to Jaster, and the fact that he still had lines, still would refuse to compromise his own morals, is nothing but a good sign. Jaster has never cared for sycophants; it was one of the first things that repelled him from Tor Vizsla, who wants nothing else in his followers. That Jon still has a backbone, still has loyalty to something larger than his own life, makes Jaster inclined to like him already.

He thinks of waking, that careful shift in the body beneath him. Leaving, he’d thought, but then Jon had curled into the warmth, settled closer, and the soft way he sought out Jaster's touch combined with the flat refusal to compromise his values—

Well. Jaster is a simple man, but he’s never been accused of bad taste.

Finishing the guest list, Jaster marks an extra name down and then hands it back, rising to his feet and selecting the most relevant pad. From the other side of the desk, there's a sound of surprise, and Myles asks with an edge of disbelief, “Clan _Wren_? They're sworn to Clan Vizsla, Mand’alor, if you’ve forgotten.”

“Oh, are they? My mistake.” Jaster frowns, considering another pad, and then takes it as well, tucking both under his arm. When he glances up, Myles is giving him a flat look that Jaster first learned to fear when they were teenagers. “It seemed a more expedient way of letting Tor know about my plans than simply sending him a comm.”

Myles looks down at the list, then back at Jaster, and he seems entirely unconvinced. “You just want to poach the new countess and make her a True Mandalorian.”

“She seems like an intelligent and reasonable person,” Jaster allows. “One who could be turned away from plans of conquering the galaxy with a rabble of thieves and traitors, if presented with a reasonable alternative.”

Myles’s sigh says that Jaster makes his life far more stressful than it needs to be. “I can contact one of the unallied clans to carry the message, but if this friendly overture loses us possible allies because we get their clan members _shot_ —”

“It will work,” Jaster says, and when Myles raises a brow at him, he smiles crookedly. “I knew Ursa’s mother. If her daughter has any of the honor that her mother did, she won't even consider harming a messenger just for carrying an invitation she doesn’t like.”

“Honor or no, she’s still Death Watch,” Myles says, but it’s not precisely a protest. He watches Jaster collect the last of the paperwork that needs his attention, and then says, “Arla is perfectly capable of getting one Jedi fitted without your oversight.”

“I'm well aware,” Jaster says dryly. “I just want to leave what our sources reported with Jon, and see what he makes of it. The odds that the Jedi Order know all of the intricacies of the Death Watch’s movements are miniscule, but with our information Jon might notice something.”

For a moment, Myles is quiet, his attention thoughtful. “You're really planning to make it a marriage,” he says after a long pause. “Political, but…”

Jaster frowns. “Of course I am,” he says, a trace of offense surfacing. “I wouldn’t have proposed a sham.”

“That’s not—” Myles stops himself, shaking his head, and he’s smiling a little crookedly. “Sorry for doubting you, Mand’alor. You're happy with the guest list?”

“For the next hour until you bring me a new one? Yes.” Jaster tries to puzzle out what Myles was going to say, but he can't be sure. Myles is quick, sees undercurrents where Jaster tends to look at the river’s course, and one of the reasons they work well together is that they're always in the same page, even when they're reading from separate books. Still, if it’s important, Myles will tell him.

“There will only be a new one if everyone on this list refuses,” Myles says. “Which isn't out of the question, given what you're asking.”

“Then it will be a very quiet wedding.” Jaster pauses at the doorway, casting a glance back. “Is there anything else?”

Myles shakes his head. “Don’t let your daughter bully you,” he says, smiling.

Jaster snorts. “I’ll just tell her that Jango tried to get out of bed,” he counters, because that will be more than enough to turn Arla's righteous indignation on her brother. Raising a hand, he leaves the office, heading for the seamstress’s workshop, and—maybe it wouldn’t be polite to intrude in normal circumstances, but given the point of this marriage Jaster assumes he’ll be forgiven for involving himself. Besides, as much as he trusts Arla, leaving her alone with a Jedi—even a nominally allied one—for too long might not be the best idea. She’s even-keeled, and clever, but she has a cold temper, and strange things rouse it sometimes.

Still, when Jaster pauses outside the door, there's no sign of a fight. Instead, he can hear Arla laughing, a low voice, a woman’s slightly higher tone. Brows rising, he raps his knuckles against the door, then opens it and steps in.


	5. Chapter 5

“Jaster!” Arla says, and rises to her feet. She’s in full armor, the way she almost always is, but her helmet is off, and Jaster smiles at the sight, taking the hands she offers him and leaning in to rest their foreheads together.

“Arla,” he returns. “Having fun?”

Arla's grin has _teeth_. “Well, we’ve found what colors _don’t_ suit your Jedi, but I think we’re getting there.”

Jaster gives her a faintly narrow look, but lets that stand. Arla isn't a cruel person, and she wouldn’t be needlessly mean to someone left in her care, even if that person was a Jedi. “Have you found something, then?”

“I think so,” Zaran says from behind one of the screens at the far end of the room. Jaster glances over just in time to see a length of dark blue cloth get tossed over the top of it. “It won't be blaster-proof, because I don’t have any resistant fabrics in the right color, but I can at least use one that’s hard to cut through.”

“I’m sure that will be fine,” Jaster says. “I've been told that Jedi are decent at deflecting blaster bolts.”

Zaran laughs, and a moment later she slides around the edge of the screen, lekku draped around her neck. “Supposedly,” she says, though there's no barb behind it. she Sorts through several rolls of fabric on a table, coming up with one in dark green, and runs her fingers over it for a moment, then hums. “All right, I think you're finished. You can take those with you and I’ll start on another set for day use, and then the formal robes. You're sure you don’t want…?”

“Just robes are fine,” Jon says quietly, and steps out from behind the screen. Jaster sweeps a look over him, impressed with Zaran’s skill the way he usually is; she picked a deep blue for the tunics, shaped almost precisely like the Jedi tunics Jaster is used to, but the cloak on top is a deep rich brown, darker than most Jedi robes to the point that it’s nearly black. The cut of them is impeccable as well, draping beautifully but not baggy. The colors make him look healthier, not washed out, and the fall of the cloth emphasizes the breadth of his shoulders and his height, makes it harder to see that he slouches a little like he’s hiding his full stature.

Zaran makes a thoughtful sound, circling him. “Is that hood too deep?” she asks with a touch of concern, and reaches out. Jaster catches the faint flinch as her hand nears Jon's face, but Jon freezes immediately after, and Zaran is too caught up in tugging and adjusting the hood to notice. It’s rare that she pays attention to much beyond cloth, anyways.

“Hm. Perhaps a little deeper in the next set, even,” she says after a moment, stepping back and considering the cloak. “What do you think?”

Jon pauses, like he’s not sure she’s addressing him, and then carefully reaches up, adjusting it. “Deeper, if that’s all right,” he says quietly.

“Of course.” Zaran leans over her table, marking a note on a scrap of flimsi. “I'm used to hoods that go over helmets, so I was overcorrecting for size, but I think a little more drape will help smooth things out.” She glances up, then gives Jaster a smile. “You brought me a challenge, Mand’alor. I like it.”

Jon's eyes flicker to Jaster, not like he was unaware of him, but…cautious. Jaster doesn’t move, just lets Arla lean against him and says, “If anyone can handle wedding garb in a week, it’s you, Zaran.”

Zaran’s red skin flushes from scarlet to crimson, and she laughs. “Flattery won't save you from a fitting,” she warns, but her smile is pleased as she circles Jon once more. “If you were hoping for a glimpse of the wedding robes, you're too late. They're our secret now.”

“Only for a few days,” Jaster says, unperturbed. He has faith in Zaran, even if her usual bulwark is blaster-resistant undersuits and creating the heavy cloth used in traditional armor. He steps forward, and Jon turns to meet him, carefully folding the hood back. Clean, his hair curls a little at the ends, feathery and soft as it falls around his face, and Jaster reaches out, clear and deliberate. When Jon sees the touch coming, he doesn’t flinch, just goes still, and Jaster smooths a few dark strands out of his face and hums.

“A braid for the wedding, perhaps,” he says, “to keep your hair out of your eyes.”

Jon swallows, but he holds still as Jaster tucks his hair back behind his ear, and when Jaster's fingers graze his cheek, he shivers just faintly. Jaster finds that he likes it more than he probably should, how easily Jon responds to a touch.

“If you want,” he says, soft, and Jaster likes that too, that he’s so soft-spoken even with his size, his scars.

He hadn’t realized how much he liked either thing, before Jon.

“Jaster's good at hair,” Arla says, lazy but focused, and Jaster can feel the weight of her gaze on his back. “He’s been braiding my hair since he adopted me.”

Jon's eyes flicker past Jaster, to Arla, and then back. He doesn’t say anything, and Jaster can't quite read the look on his face, but he lowers his hand regardless. “Yes, well, you looked like something I dragged out of a swamp when I first found you, and you wouldn’t let anyone close to you with scissors. I was desperate.”

Arla snorts, clearly unrepentant for all the heart attacks she inflicted on Jaster in childhood. “You're the one who thought I was Mando material the moment I tried to stab you,” she says, only a little sharp around the edges, but…rueful. That’s progress, likely.

“I have good taste,” Jaster tells her, though he can't quite take his eyes off the scarred planes of Jon's face, the way his lashes dip as he tugs the cloak a little more tightly around his shoulders. He’s striking. “Jon, I have several reports on Death Watch’s activity that might be helpful in piecing together their suppliers, if you would like to look them over.”

Something like relief crosses Jon's face, and he nods without hesitation. “I have two more names for you, as well,” he says. “Potential contacts between the gangs and the Death Watch.”

Deliberately, Jaster offers Jon his arm, and when Jon freezes, flicking him a glance, he smiles. “I believe the table in my quarters should be plenty large enough for our needs, and I can have a light meal brought. And tea, if you enjoy it.”

Jon pauses for a long, long moment, like he’s not sure what to do. Jaster almost expects him to pull away, but he holds still, waiting Jon out. And, finally, carefully, a long-fingered hand curls around his arm, hanging on with a grip that’s a little awkward, like he’s trying not to hold too tight. “I do,” Jon says quietly. “I—thank you.”

Jaster folds a hand over Jon's, pressing his thumb lightly against scarred knuckles. Reassurance, maybe, though it’s a small gesture in the scheme of things. “You're quite welcome,” he says.

When he turns to steer them towards the door, Arla is watching him closely, something surprised in the arch of her eyebrows, amused in the curl of her mouth. At Jaster's look, though, she just shakes her head and raises her hands, and says, “Have fun,” with a dry, sardonic edge.

“Your brother keeps trying to escape the medical wing,” Jaster tells her, and feels no remorse when her expression immediately twists into an elder sister’s indignant fury. Jango deserves it, and it’s a thorough distraction from Arla picking over Jaster's actions. He’ll take it.

“Excuse me,” Arla bites out, shoving to her feet and jamming her helmet on. She storms past Jaster and out of the room, a hurricane heading right for Jango's bedside, and Jaster feels a wash of amused satisfaction as he watches her disappear. That should keep them _both_ out of trouble for at least a few hours.

With a chuckle, Zaran crouches down, gathering up a stack of folded cloth and wrapping it neatly in what looks like another cloak, this one in deep green. “Here, Jedi,” she says, rising and offering them up. “Another set of robes in different colors. I should have more for you by the end of the week, if my assistant ever finds his way back from all the clubs on Nar Shaddaa.”

Jon falters. “I—more?” he says, caught off guard. “You needn’t—I can repair my old robes. This is already…”

Zaran’s brows wing up towards her headwrap, but she shakes her head and pushes the clothes at Jon insistently. “Not on my watch, Jedi,” she says firmly. “It’s fine if your Order doesn’t mind you in rags on missions, but if you're marrying my Mand’alor, I’ll dress you well. There are standards.”

Jaster can feel Jon's tension, can see the way he’s about to open his mouth, and he curls his hand a little tighter over’s Jon's, takes a half-step forward before he can speak and inclines his head to Zaran. “Standards no one could meet more ably. Thank you, Zaran.” Deftly, he takes the second set of robes from her, and says, “Will you need to see me?”

Zaran’s frown eases, and she smiles. “At your earliest convenience, Mand’alor. Your armor’s been in need of an update for a while now regardless, and this is a good excuse.”

Jaster doesn’t grimace, because she’s right, but the idea of being without his armor even for a few days feels a little like being stranded naked in the middle of the wilderness. “I’ll have it brought tonight.”

“Thank you.” She inclines her head. “I’ll work quickly, you have my word.”

“That much I never doubted,” Jaster says, and shuffles his datapads and the robes for a moment, gets them tucked under his arm, and then steers Jon toward the door that Arla left ajar. Jon is moving a little gingerly, careful with his steps in a way that means he’s most certainly in pain, and Jaster casts a look over him, then gently pulls away enough to reach his comm.

“The new robes look quite striking on you,” he says, most of his attention on a message to the kitchens. “I’ll admit to some confusion over the Jedi Order’s dress code, but I hope these colors don’t fall too far outside of it. They flatter you.”

Jon falters, just enough for Jaster to notice. His head snaps towards Jaster, then he immediately ducks, hair falling forward to hide his face. It’s not quite quick enough for Jaster to miss the wash of red across tanned skin, though, high up across the tops of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose.

“I—there's. No dress code,” Jon says, but it’s rough, even rougher than normal. When Jaster sends the message and reaches out to take his arm again, he startles, seeming spooked, and Jaster pauses. When Jon doesn’t actively recoil from him, though, he takes a step forward, and when Jon stays where he is, Jaster slides a hand across his shoulder, hand a steady pressure. Drags it down the too-obvious line of Jon's spine through soft cloth, making his touch as obvious as he can, and then curls a hand over Jon's hip, taking some of his weight.

“None? That’s good to hear,” he says softly, and Jon's head ducks as a helpless shiver runs through him. It’s intriguing in a way that it likely shouldn’t be, and Jaster pauses. Wishes his other arm wasn’t full, because if he brushed Jon's hair back, he could see that expression, and he _wants_ to.

Taking a breath, he contains himself. This marriage is political in nature, and they're both well aware of it. gestures that would be more at home between two people courting aren’t appropriate.

That doesn’t change the fact that Jaster's fingers itch to touch.

“Our meal should arrive before we do,” he says, and helps Jon forward, trying not to be too aware of lean muscle beneath his arm, the way Jon's hip fits so neatly in the curve of his hand. “I told them to leave it in the garden, if you're feeling well enough for some fresh air.”

“Please,” Jon says, hoarse, and he’s still not looking at Jaster, has his face tipped away. From one offhand, barely-there compliment, Jaster thinks, and then sets it aside and files the whole matter away for later.

“Tell me, Jon,” he says, and makes it as casual as possible. “Have you spent much time in the Jedi Archives?”

That, at least, makes Jon lift his head, something like surprise crossing his face. “The Archives?” he asks. “Yes. My Master is—she uncovers rare books for the Order, sometimes, and I was tasked with bringing them back to Coruscant.”

That’s not anything close to what Jaster was expecting him to say, but it’s also _intriguing_. “Rare books?” he asks, steering Jon around a corner. “I didn’t think Jedi went looking for such things.” He certainly hadn’t thought that they would _appreciate_ them, the way that harpy of a Jedi guards her Archives.

Jon slants him a look that’s something close to bemused. “Madame Nu, the head of the Archives, she spent most of her time as a Knight and Master looking for old manuscripts,” he says. “She and my Master were crèchemates, and since my Master isn't often in the Temple, she keeps looking for Madame Nu.”

At some point Jaster will be interested in all of the various intricacies of Jedi lineages and the politics involved, but for right now he’s entirely sidetracked by the knowledge that he’s managed to accidentally stumble over someone _directly_ connected to the witch. “I was unaware that the Jedi had such a tradition—I had assumed most of the books were relating to the Order specifically.”

“Some are,” Jon says, and there's the faintest pull to one corner of his mouth, as if something about this conversation is amusing him. “But the Order is safe, so some worlds pass on sacred texts, or histories. For safekeeping. And—other worlds have Force traditions that the Order tries to preserve.”

The overarching histories of the Order and its part in the fabric of the Republic was reason enough to want access to their Archives. Knowing that there’s _more_ makes Jaster's fingers itch desperately. If he could find records of the Mandalorian involvement in things from periods where Mandalore’s own history is spotty—it would be biased, of course, but the Jedi haven’t faced _nearly_ the schisms that Mandalorians have, and the odds that more of their records are intact are high. And beyond that, the Archives are _vast_. Jaster had been interested in Jedi policy and training and overall knowledge, because no matter how stiff and boring they can be the Jedi are second only to the Mandalorians in terms of martial prowess, but—

There's _more._ There are records from likely hundreds of worlds, traditions and cultures the Jedi have respected and preserved, texts that have nothing to do with the Order but which have been maintained and kept safe across the ages.

Silently, despite all of his words to Myles, Jaster slides getting access to the Archives higher up on his priority list. Once they sign the papers, the harpy will _have_ to let him in.

“Well,” Jaster says, and drags his mind back to slightly more immediate matters. “I hope if you happen to take after your Master, and if you find anything in your travels that would appeal, you’ll think of me fondly.”

Jon ducks his head, but this time Jaster catches the way his expression lightens, how his mouth curves in the half-second before his hair hides his face again. “Madame Nu has never found a book she’s not interested in,” he says, and Jaster wants to protest, wants to be indignant—

“I hope,” he says with great gravity, raising a brow at the Jedi on his arm, “that you aren’t _laughing_ at me, Knight Antilles.”

Jon shakes his head, but he doesn’t raise it, and he doesn’t speak, which makes Jaster rather doubtful as to the truth of his words.

“I’ll look,” Jon says softly, but this time it really is soft, gentle around the edges in a way that catches Jaster's attention. “And split what I find down the middle, between you and the Order.”

“No splitting the books,” Jaster says, a trace of horror surfacing. It’s mostly fueled by memories of Jango returning from a job with an ancient printing of a rare book simply shoved in his pack like a spare ration, with a fresh caf stain on the corner of the cover. Jaster isn't a weak man, but that—that was almost enough to move him to despair.

Thankfully, the look Jon shoots him is equal parts bewildered and taken aback. “I _wouldn’t_ ,” he says, and Jaster breathes out in deep relief.

“I was simply making sure,” he says, and steers Jon to a set of wide glass doors overlooking the fields in the distance. Without Jaster having to ask, Jon reaches for the latch, pushing the closest one open, and Jaster helps him through it, then pauses as it falls shut behind them. Ahead, the stone terrace gives way to stairs, and he eyes them, then casts a glance at Jon, who’s already very clearly strained himself.

“I believe this calls for an adjustment,” he says, and loosens his grip on Jon. The fact that Jon's knees almost buckle as he steps away is a sign that Jaster is right to worry, and he frowns, shifting the robes and pads. “Given the rate of your healing and the wounds, the fact that you’re still this unsteady—”

But Jon shakes his head before Jaster can finish. “I was…healing myself,” he says. “Afterwards. But it was too much. Like—like running twenty kilometers when you already have a gut wound.”

Jaster weighs that explanation. “The use of the Force translates directly to physical exertion?” he asks, a little surprised. He’d thought it was…well. Mental, and therefore able to give one a headache, but nothing beyond that.

Jon nods, and when Jaster offers him the pads and clothes, he glances at them, but takes them without protest or even comment. “Jedi are…the Force made physical,” he says, like it’s a struggle to put it into words. “How it…manifests. But we have to channel it through a physical form, and that takes effort.”

It makes about as much sense as anything regarding the Force does, and Jaster files his questions away as something to press Jon on later, when he’s steadier, and steps forward. “Arm around my neck,” he says, and Jon's eyes widen.

“I can—” he starts, taking a half-step back.

Deftly, Jaster catches his arm before he can get too far. “Jon,” he says. “This has been more than enough exertion already, and I'm asking you to remain upright and focused while we go over the data as well. Allow me to make it slightly easier on you in this way at least.”

Jon swallows, eyes flickering from Jaster to the stairs and back, but after a long second he nods once. Jaster gives him a crooked smile, but takes another step to close the gap between them and leans down, wrapping an arm around Jon's upper back and then sliding the other behind his knees. There's a pause, but after a moment Jon's arm curls around the back of his neck, and Jaster shifts his weight, rocks back on his heels, and then lifts him as carefully as he can. It still gets him a gasp, one sharp inhale that’s all pain, but Jaster stays still for a long moment, letting Jon adjust, and finally the grip on him eases.

With a ragged breath, Jon buries his face in Jaster's shoulder, clearly hiding, and Jaster lets him. Minding his steps, he starts forward, and—well. Carrying Jon is quite a bit easier out of full armor. The stairs are a little treacherous to navigate, but hardly enough so to make him stop, and he gets them down without incident, then heads along the path of paving stones towards the area that his rooms overlook.

“Given your Master’s apparent penchant for book-hunting, I assume you were forced to read at least a few,” he says, a deliberate attempt to distract, and it seems to work. There's a pause, a breath, and then a nod, still pressed to Jaster's shoulder.

“She studied…old traditions,” Jon manages. “And I learned them, too. She—we spent a year in a lost Temple once, in the Unknown Regions. She—she thought it might have been the first.”

Jaster raises a brow. “The Jedi Temple didn’t start on Coruscant?” he asks. “Given its age and its ties to the Republic, I would have expected the one on Coruscant to be the original.”

Jon shakes his head, not looking up even as Jaster spots the small table beneath a leaning tree, the two covered trays and the large pot of tea that’s been set out. One of the chairs is cushioned, and Jaster heads for it.

“There are…older ones,” Jon says. “Tython, and Ahch-To. No one knows which came first.”

There are similar debates about the origins of the Mandalorian clans, but Jaster hadn’t realized the Jedi Order would have the same sort of uncertainty attached. He crouches down, carefully easing Jon into the chair, and at the strangled hitch of breath, he winces, straightens. Smooths a hand over Jon's hair as Jon curls forward a little, protecting the wound, and stays there until Jon's breaths even out again.

“And your Master assumes the one in the Unknown Regions is the first? On what grounds?” he asks, equally to distract and because he wants to know.

It takes Jon a moment to gather himself, but finally he raises his head and says, “The age of another Temple in the Outer Rim. It’s—some Jedi dispute it, but my Master thinks it was the second, that the Order spread inward towards the Core. That the first Jedi were from the Unknown Regions, but were explorers who stumbled on the Republic.”

It’s certainly not a theory that Jaster has heard before, though the Jedi have always rather been shrouded in mystery and legend and pure bantha dung in the form of spacers’ tales. He hums thoughtfully, tapping his fingers against the tabletop as he takes the other seat, and then leans forward to uncover the teapot. “And you? Do you agree with her?”

Jon blinks at him, clearly startled to be asked, but pauses as he considers, drawing his cloak a little more tightly around himself and tucking his hands into the sleeves. He seems most comfortable with as much skin covered as possible, and given his reaction when he thought Jaster was mentioning his scars, it makes sense. “I…” he starts, and then pauses. Weighs something for a moment, and then says quietly. “There's…a skill. A Force ability that’s rare. They mention it on Ahch-To, but…the next mention of it is on Ruusan, near the Valley of the Souls. There’s an old tomb, with texts that show the same thing, and—smugglers have stories about one of Ruusan’s moons, and an old civilization there that has nothing left to it but ruins.”

It is, Jaster thinks with some surprise, carefully reasoned and thoughtful, attentive to details. Not what he would have expected from a Jedi wandering around with holes in his boots. “Sometimes skills arise independently,” he points out, more to see what Jon's response will be than because he truly wants to argue.

Jon nods. “They do,” he allows. “But it changed as the Order did, and methods in the texts on Ruusan are identical to the ones on Ahch-To. Either the text traveled later, or the skill did, and…I don’t know which.”

Jaster hums, pouring cups for both of them. He passes Jon's over, watching surreptitiously as Jon wraps long fingers around the mug and holds it close, and makes a mental note to ask Zaran to be sure Jon has a heavy winter cloak when he leaves her his armor this evening. She’ll likely think of it herself, but he wants to be sure. “It’s certainly an interesting argument. I would like to know more, if you have any books on the matter.”

“I know some,” Jon says, and there’s something carefully pleased to the slant of his mouth in the moment before he hides it behind the cup, takes a sip and then pauses. Jaster watches his face, the flicker of surprise and then pleasure, and smiles to himself. A fan of tea, then, and able to tell a good one when he tastes it.

Clearing his throat, Jaster busies himself with removing the covers from their trays, then settling Jon's in front of him. “Eat,” he says. “And tell me what makes you think that there was a Jedi settlement on the Ruusan moon. I’ll admit I've heard rumors of such a thing, but I've never gone there.”

For a long moment, there's no response. When Jaster glances up, Jon is watching him, something Jaster can't read on his face. Before Jaster can ask, though, Jon ducks his head, brushing his hair back behind his ears, and nods.

“I—thank you,” he says, a little rough. “For the food. And the tea.”

“Of course,” Jaster says, a little confused as to why this needs thanks. Pauses, and belatedly says, “It may be too hot for your tastes,” just as Jon takes his first bite.

Jon snorts softly, though it’s amusement rather than offense, and like this, sitting across from him, Jaster can see the slant of that amusement clearly for the first time. It warms Jon's features, brightens his eyes, and for a moment, Jaster can't quite look away.

“It’s good,” Jon says, looking up, and the swift, almost furtive glance from those pale eyes hold Jaster's attention in a way nothing has in a very long while.

“Finish the plate and then tell me that again,” Jaster says after a moment too long, and picks up his own fork. Shakes himself, breathes in, and focuses. “You’ve been to Ruusan, then?”

Easier, really, to consider the almost-mythical history of the Jedi Order than anything else right now. Jaster can dwell on things later, and overthink his own reactions then. For now, a pleasant conversation seems far mor enjoyable than self-reflection.


	6. Chapter 6

The thing Jon hates the most about being injured and unable to heal himself is the sheer amount of _rest_ his body needs.

It’s a vulnerability, and even more than that, it’s an aggravation. For Jon's whole period of training, he would always heal himself, or be healed if he couldn’t, and recovery was a matter of a single day and then getting up, ignoring the pain, and keeping moving. Dark Woman wouldn’t have accepted any sort of exhaustion as an excuse, especially when it was Jon's own failure that left him needing healing in the first place.

Healing himself on the battlefield after Montross shot him kept him alive long enough for Jaster to find him, but it also left him alarmingly weak, tired in a bone-deep way that’s wholly unpleasant. Jon hates the helplessness of it, the way he can't quite make his body do what it should, the way his limits are strange and amorphous and come up on him without warning. It’s entirely aggravating, how much sleep he needs, and—

Having someone see him like this is unnerving in a way Jon can't even begin to put into words.

He doesn’t remember going to sleep—the last thing he can recall is Jaster in the garden, talking about the history of the planets in the Mandalore system—but he wakes up back in bed, covered in a pile of blankets in a way that would seem like unspeakable indulgence if he were on a mission still. But—

This isn't a mission. Jon doesn’t know _what_ it is, but…not that.

It takes a long moment before Jon is truly awake, a moment longer to want to move at all. He’s warm, and his body feels heavy, his mind slow and calm. Despite the ache of too much tiredness, the faint pull of the wounds in his stomach, Jon doesn’t want to move. Dark Woman would be furious, because he should be moving, be heading for his next mission, but the Force is quiescent, the familiar pull of it gone slack. There's nowhere else to be, just _here_ , and Jon breathes out, half-turning his head and burying his face in the pillows.

He’s in Jaster's spot. This is precisely where Jaster slept last night, and Jon can smell faint metal and skin and something unidentifiable, exactly what he woke up to when he opened his eyes this morning and Jaster was on top of him.

Jon's skin prickles faintly, and his breath catches. He digs his fingers into cloth, swallowing as sense-memory gives him the feeling of Jaster pressed up against his back again, Jaster's breath against his skin, Jaster's arm around him. _Warm_ , and Jon shouldn’t want it; he’s never been that close to someone else, never wanted that vulnerability enough to seek out anything sexual with another person. But—

He’s already vulnerable here, already in this strange, suspended state that’s nothing like anything that’s come before. Somehow that makes it less gut-wrenching, even just thinking of being so close to someone else.

With a trace of heat in his face, Jon closes his eyes, wrestles down the thought. This marriage is nothing but a political alliance, and Jon isn't a diplomat, has never taken those missions even when the Council tries to give them to him, but he’s seen more than enough marriages like that. And—it’s what he should do. Jedi respect culture regardless of what form it takes, and Mandalorian culture is at least something the Jedi are familiar with, given their history. Jon knew that Montross was a traitor to the True Mandalorians, that Jaster had a claim on his life, and he killed him anyway.

It was the right thing to do, and Jon refuses to regret it.

Light, quick, there's a rap on the door, just barely loud enough for Jon to hear. A little startled, he sits up too fast, hisses when his wound pulls, but jerks his robes back up over his shoulders and tightens the sash where it’s come loose as he says, “Yes?”

The door clicks open, and Myles leans in, a sweep of his eyes taking in the sun-filled room before his gaze falls to Jon. “Sorry to disturb you,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping.”

Silently, Jon shakes his head, and the decision to slide out of bed should be an easy one, but he still hesitates. Better to sit in Jaster's bed and talk to his aide, or better to stand and likely fall?

Before he can make the choice, Myles steps into the room, letting the door close behind him, and he’s carrying a tray with two cups and a pot of tea on it, balanced on one hand, a datapad tucked under one arm. “Good,” he says, and that smile is mostly perfunctory, but—not cruelly meant. Jon can feel that much, and the edge of wariness to him as well. “I had a few questions for you, if that’s all right.”

Jon's new cloak is hanging on a hook by the door, well out of reach unless Jon wants to call it to him with the Force, and that’s probably a step too far, even if he wants it to hide his face. Swallowing, he inclines his head, and Myles settles the tray on the chest at the foot of the bed and takes a seat there, pouring cups for both of them.

“Herbal,” he says, without looking at Jon. “I know Jaster gave you caffeinated tea earlier, but the medical droids said you shouldn’t have too much. This is one of my favorites anyway.”

“I like herbal teas,” Jon says quietly. He usually carries a pack of herbs and flowers with him for just that reason, though they have other uses as well.

Myles snorts, soft, as he hands over one of the cups. “Good,” he says, amused. “Reinforcements. Jango and Arla both act like I'm trying to poison the last of the Fett clan when I serve it to them, and Jaster calls it twig water.”

Jon smiles despite himself, ducking his head to hide it as he raises the cup. It’s hot, a little sweet, and the first sip clears some of the cobwebs from his mind, settles the edge of sleep that lingers. “It’s good,” he says quietly, and Myles smiles at him, more genuine than before.

“It’s from Haruun Kal,” he says. “I don’t go back there often, but the tea is worth it.”

Jon stares down at the pale blue liquid in the cup, then closes his eyes. He remembers the feel of the planet, heavy against his bones, more full of life than many places he’s been despite the toxic gasses filling the lowlands. “Haruun Kal is beautiful,” he offers, and Myles raises both brows in clear surprise.

“You’ve been there?” he asks, and the dip of Jon's head doesn’t mute the surprise. “Searching for new Jedi initiates?”

Horror rises, and Jon quickly shakes his head, shifting back. There’s only one Korun Jedi for a reason. “The Korun don’t—I wouldn’t. But. There were people smuggling akk dogs, and I thought—the Korun were the best people to care for them—”

With a sound of amusement, Myles raises his hands. “Easy, Jedi. I know your people don’t steal children. But it’s rare for a Jedi to _choose_ to go to Haruun Kal.” There's a pause as he looks Jon over, and he asks with faint interest, “Did you like it?”

Jon hesitates, trying to sense a trap in the words, but there doesn’t seem to be one. “Yes,” he says after a long moment, a little wary. “It’s…strong in the Force. Being there felt peaceful.”

“Peaceful,” Myles repeats, the slant of his mouth rueful. “That’s not a word I hear applied to Haruun Kal often. But thank you.”

Jon watches as he settles his datapad on his knees, waking it up with a flick of his fingers. “It’s…surprising,” he says, careful. “That you're a Mandalorian.”

“Because I'm Force-sensitive?” Myles asks without looking up, and thankfully he mostly sounds amused. “Don’t worry, I'm not looking to become the next Tarre Vizsla. My sense of the Force is so stunted I can't even bond with an akk dog. That’s why I left Haruun Kal as a child. The best I can do is aim well and know when to duck.”

“Valuable, in a Mandalorian,” Jon says, and Myles smiles to himself, quiet and private.

“Especially my sense for when my Mand’alor is getting in over his head,” he says fondly, and glances up. “That’s right now, for the record. Jaster is making a play to consolidate power, and no one is going to take it well except his supercommandos, his allied clans, and maybe a few of the clans that are already leaning towards joining him. The wedding is going to be a _disaster_.”

Resignation is all Jon can feel from him, and it’s something close to unnerving. Jon would have expected recriminations, blame, Myles trying to get him to leave. Instead, there’s simple acceptance of the circumstances, and Jon pleats the blanket between his fingers for a moment, trying to find words, and then asks carefully, “Are you…telling me not to marry him?”

Myles glances up again, surprise clear on his face, and shoves the pad at Jon. “What? No. You couldn’t chose not to even if I told you to. Jaster's as stubborn as a wampa with a fresh haunch, and if you bolt now, he’ll just marry you in absentia. I just wanted to use your instinct to tell me where to concentrate security.”

Bemused, Jon takes it, studying the map of what must be the compound they're in. It’s on a hill, with wide fields on three sides and a wood and river behind them, and Jon lets a fingertip rest there as he considers. “Your instincts?” he asks.

Myles snorts. “What I can do is more immediate. This is two weeks out, and all I can give you is the fact that there’s _going_ to be a problem and the names of the people most likely to cause those problems, which is roughly a quarter of the system. But I need to know where our weaknesses are _now_.”

“The woods,” Jon says without hesitation, and traces his finger down over a narrow line that circles the compound. “This is a wall?”

“Two meters, made of stone,” Myles confirms, and leans over, touching three places along the line. “These are the gates, and there are four tunnels from the house running underneath it for a quick escape if it comes to that, but I’d rather it didn’t.”

“One of them opens in the woods?” Jon guesses, and one glance at Myles's face is enough to know he’s right. “I have…a bad feeling about that tunnel.”

Myles's mouth tightens, and he rubs a hand over his jaw. It looks like it’s been a few days since he shaved. “If an enemy knows that the tunnel is there, it means we have a traitor. I don’t like that at all.”

Jon doesn’t have anything helpful to offer, so he looks back down at the map. The river flows down around the base of the hill, splitting to form a natural moat, and Jon frowns at it for a moment, then says, “That’s all I can think of. But…I’ll go out and meditate here later, to see if I can sense anything.”

With a sigh, Myles runs a hand over his hair. “I’ll get Jaster to take you,” he says. “He’s been locked up in his office brooding about not having his armor all afternoon.”

“I have not,” a voice says from behind them, and Jon startles hard enough that he almost spills his tea. Myles _does_ drop his tea, and Jon catches it before it can spill over the datapad with a quick touch of the Force, then turns.

Jaster raises a brow at them in return, though there’s a curl at the corner of his mouth that’s all amusement. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Our plotting against you,” Myles says, pointed, and rises to his feet. He snags his cup out of the air, then takes Jon's as well and collects the tray and teapot. “Your fiancé needs to meditate. Go take him out to the river, Mand’alor. I’ll tell Arla so she can make sure you don’t get shot.”

“The river,” Jaster repeats, other brow rising to match the first. He looks between them for a moment. “Is this something only Force-sensitives can share?”

“Yes,” Myles says, perfectly mild. “But if you’d rather leave it to Arla to take him, I have another few additions to the guest list—”

“I didn’t say I _wouldn’t_ ,” Jaster says, with a little more haste than he otherwise might have. Jon feels a flicker of amusement, even as he gets his feet underneath himself and rises carefully.

A hand deftly catches his elbow, holding him up, and Jaster steps into his space without hesitation, holding Jon up with the bulk of his body. “The river is a long way for an injured man to walk,” he says, and there's concern in the furrow of his brow.

Before Jon can protest that he’ll be fine, Myles snorts. “I wasn’t expecting him to walk, given the precedent,” he says dryly, and nods to Jon. “Thank you.”

Jon hesitates, but nods back. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to refrain from mentioning that this is a trip to scout for possible problems to Jaster, but…that seems like a good bet. “Thank you for the tea,” he says, and Myles gives him a smile that’s actually almost friendly.

“I have more twig water I think you’d like,” he says. “I’ll bring a different blend next time.”

“And here I thought you had _taste_ ,” Jaster tells Jon, though it’s largely directed at Myles. “Perhaps I should call the wedding off after all.”

“If you do, you're going to have to be the one to comm every single guest I convinced to rearrange their schedule at the last minute to tell them _why_ you're forcing them to do it again,” Myles says calmly. When Jaster grimaces, he snorts, then says, “Let your Jedi see the river, Mand’alor. It will be good for him.”

“Does my Jedi _want_ to see the river?” Jaster counters, slanting a look at Jon. The use of the possessive makes something knot in Jon's chest, traps his words in his throat, so all he manages is a nod.

“Very well, then,” Jaster says, giving in gracefully, and he steps away from Jon to pull Jon's cloak off its hook. Jon stands very still as Jaster drapes it over his shoulders, knuckles skimming Jon's throat, and—it’s hard to think past the broadness of him, the heat. Jon can feel the imprint of those fingers against his skin, and Jaster's close enough that it’s difficult to breathe as he hooks the clasp at Jon's throat. It makes Jon swallow, and when he raises his eyes, Jaster is watching him, steady and a little concerned.

“It can be an undertaking for tomorrow, if you would like,” Jaster says quietly, smoothing the backs of his fingers down across the fold of Jon's tunic. There's cloth between them, but—Jon's skin still flushes with heat like Jaster laid hands on him directly, and his mouth feels arid. “Myles will live, being disobeyed just this once.”

Myles's scoff makes his feelings on that clear, and Jon can't help but smile a little, ducking his head to hide it.

“No,” he says, a little rough in his throat. “I would like it. To see the river.”

“Even if I have to carry you?” Jaster asks, and Jon sucks in a startled breath as fingers catch his chin, tugging his head up. He freezes, feeling caught, but—

Jaster is smiling just a little, and there's a tangle of emotion around them that Jon can't parse.

“It’s fine,” Jon manages. “If. If you're all right with it.”

“It’s decent exercise, considering how little you weigh,” Jaster says, raising a brow, and then tells Myles, “You don’t need to disturb Arla, seeing as she’s still torturing her brother. I have my blaster if I need it.”

“If you're sure, Mand’alor,” Myles says, perfectly bland, and Jon doesn’t need to know him to know that that tone means he’s going to entirely disregard Jaster's orders. It makes him bite back a smile, because Jaster's sigh says he clearly knows as well, but Jaster doesn’t argue.

“Thank you, Myles,” he says sardonically, and offers Jon his arm. “Let’s see if you can make it down the stairs this time. I believe that at least won't make the med-droids implode in fury, and it will lessen the chances of me killing us both attempting it.”

Jon looks from Jaster's arm to his face, then carefully reaches out, folding his fingers over hard muscle and hot skin where Jaster's shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbow. It makes him swallow again against the dryness in his mouth, and he manages, “Thank you.”

“Thank _you_. Myles might have a point about staying in my office too long.” Jaster ignores Myles's knowing look, leading Jon towards the glass doors set into the far wall, and says, “If we’re quick, we might even see the sunset over the river. I’ve been told it’s worth the walk.”

Jon raises his face to the clouds as they step outside, and he closes his eyes against the cool breeze, soft and full of green. It smells like turned earth and growing things, dark and clean, and Jon smiles. “It’s going to rain,” he says. “But not for a few hours.”

“More Jedi predictions?” Jaster asks, amused, and wraps an arm around Jon's lower back, holding him up as he carefully moves down the stairs.

“I don’t need a connection to the Force to see rainclouds,” Jon says, mild, and Jaster laughs. At the bottom of the stairs, he turns, shifting his grip, and Jon is used enough to the gesture by now that he doesn’t protest, just wraps his arms around Jaster's neck as he’s lifted.

“A more mundane explanation than I’d expected,” Jaster admits, and then says more softly, over Jon's sharp breath, “Just until the ground levels out. The river isn't far.”

Silently, Jon nods, trying to keep his breath even. It hurts less than walking all the way to the river would, but—he hates being injured. Healing himself will have to wait until he’s a little stronger, but it can't come soon enough.

“I've never been to Concord Dawn before,” he manages after a moment, curling his fingers into Jaster's shirt.

There's a moment of silence, careful and deliberate, and then Jaster sighs. “I was born here,” he says. “My mother was a farmer, but she suffered too many bad years, and I became a Journeyman Protector instead of following in her footsteps.”

Jon knows, in a vague way, the current Mand’alor’s history. A convicted murderer from Concord Dawn who nevertheless managed to rally a vast number of the Mandalorian clans behind him when he rewrote and revised all the old codes. It’s the bare-bones, basic recitation that could have come from Dark Woman or a Jedi report, and Jon doesn’t remember where he learned it. But…it’s not enough, he thinks, tightening his fingers in Jaster's shirt. He doesn’t know precisely what’s wrong with it, but there's something wrong all the same.

“From Journeyman Protector to Mand’alor,” Jon says, and Jaster snorts, amused.

“With a stop at _criminal_ along the way,” he says wryly as they pass beneath the shadow of a gate. “Concord Dawn’s governor is waiting out the civil war before she recognizes me as Mand’alor and lifts my banishment, so technically I believe I'm still supposed to be arrested on sight here.”

“I’ll stop anyone who tries,” Jon says dryly before he can think better of it, then remembers himself and sucks in a breath, braced for annoyance or anger—

Jaster laughs, shifting his hold on Jon as he makes his way down a steep hill. He slides the last few feet, then crouches down, settling Jon on the grass and taking a seat beside him. “Should anyone breech the defenses, I’ll rely on you,” he says, smiling, and Jon has to duck his head and look away, throat feeling tight.

“And what of you?” Jaster asks after a moment, the weight of his eyes unwavering. Jon feels too hot under his gaze, too large for his own skin. “I know Jedi are raised in the Temple—”

That, at least, Jon can answer. He shakes his head, tangling his fingers in the grass. “I was…raised by my Master,” he says. “She’s—not traditional. And she never told me where she found me, but—we traveled the Outer Rim constantly.”

“She raised a skilled fighter,” Jaster says, and a flash of movement makes Jon twitch, but it’s just Jaster's hand, his fingertips skimming Jon's cheek, brushing his hair back behind his ear. When Jon looks up at him, helpless not to, Jaster raises a brow. “I assume it was you who decimated Montross’s unit.”

Jon nods, and that at least is easier to talk about. “They weren’t expecting a Jedi,” he says, and Jaster snorts, mouth curving.

“An understatement, I'm sure,” he says, then pauses, eyeing Jon closely. “When you're well again, I'm going to demand a match,” he warns, a touch of humor in it.

Jon blinks, then snorts. “If you expect me to object, you'll be waiting a while,” he says. “I…enjoy sparring.”

“Fighting,” Jaster corrects, and Jon hesitates, but inclines his head. It’s true enough. He likes testing himself, likes matching himself against an opponent, likes overcoming. He’s lived his whole life fighting, and peace is always something to seek, but in the absence of it, Jon is a good swordsman, and enjoys being so.

“Your Order uses different styles of bladework,” Jaster says. When Jon glances up, a little wary, Jaster is looking out over the silver curl of the river, as if that will hide how much of his attention is focused on Jon. It makes Jon hide a smile, because Jaster did the same thing earlier when they were eating. Studied disinterest, carefully cultivated, like it will cover the sharpness of his mind. “I've tried to get my hands on any books about them, but they seem to be in short supply outside the Temple itself.”

“Yes,” Jon allows, crossing his legs beneath himself and leaning forward. The river is broad, slow, full of fish, and he stares down at it for a moment, trying to tease out the pull of the Force well before the danger arrives. “The forms we use are meant for lightsabers, so there isn't much call for them outside the Order. But—I know the basics of six of the seven. I can show you, if you’d like.”

 _Glee_ is the best word to describe that reaction, a wash of interest and burning delight that spikes through Jaster, bright enough to jar a laugh from Jon's throat. He ducks his head, trying to control himself, and there’s a flicker of offense, amusement, something Jon can't read, and a hand grabs his shoulder.

“You are _laughing_ at me,” Jaster says sternly, like Jon can't feel his humor, and with a gentle shove he topples Jon back to the grass, looming over him. Jon lets himself be pushed, still snickering a little, and Jaster huffs like he’s been mortally offended.

“You—that’s the reaction of initiates,” Jon says, laughing, raising his hands to fend Jaster off when he makes a move like he’s going to swat at Jon. “I— _padawans_ are less excited about learning the forms.”

Jaster tangles their fingers, shoving Jon's blocking hands down, though he doesn’t make any move towards retribution. “I would be _less_ excited if you Jedi didn’t lock all of your archives up in a tower guarded by a _harpy_ ,” he says, and the curl of callused fingers around Jon's wrists makes him shiver, breath catching as heat slides slow and silvery through his veins. “Different martial traditions should be shared—”

“I'm not sure if you know this,” Jon says, “but Mandalorians have a history of killing Jedi, and giving them our forms—”

Jaster leans over him, one brow rising, and deliberately pins one of Jon's hands to the grass beside his head. “And yet you volunteered to hand them over to me,” he says. “You're confident in your own skills, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Jon says honestly. He knows he’s good in a fight. “And I'm only a master at one form. There are Jedi far, far better than me at the others.”

“Oh?” Jaster raises a brow. “You specialized, then. Which form is yours?”

“Form VI, Niman,” Jon says, and then, just to see the look on Jaster's face, “It’s called the Diplomat’s Form.”

Jaster blinks, entirely caught off guard, and Jon can't help it; he laughs again, turning his face away to hide it, and Jaster's exasperated sigh and derisive “ _Jetii_ ,” above him just makes him laugh harder.

He can't remember the last time he laughed at all. It’s…unexpected, but—good. Startlingly good.


	7. Chapter 7

“You _cannot_ tell me that the Jedi have records of the Infinite Empire,” Jaster says flatly. “The Rakata themselves have no records of their past before their reemergence, and you expect me to believe that the Jedi know more? You are talking _pseudoscience_ at _best_ —”

“It’s true,” Jon says, and Jaster can see the smile he tries to hide. Without all of that shaggy hair in his face, it’s rather harder, particularly when he’s flat on his back in the grass. “The _Revan Mythologies_ —”

Jaster can't help himself; he scoffs, loudly, and catches the edge of Jon's hood, dragging it over his face and then down with a quick tug.

The fact that Jon doesn’t flinch, just laughs, makes something warm in Jaster's chest, and he finds that he’s smiling despite the absolute _nonsense_ coming out of Jon's mouth.

“ _Drivel_ ,” he says dismissively. “The _Revan Mythologies_ are nothing but adaptations of the Qel-Droma Epics, restructured for Jedi younglings who can't be bothered to read them without a patina of propaganda on top.”

Jon pushes his hood back, lets it fall to the grass beneath him, and the deep brown shows the true black of his hair more clearly, makes his pale eyes ghostlike. There's a scar that slants down from his forehead across the bridge of his nose, wide and pale against his skin, and Jaster wants to drag his thumb down it, trace it to where it nearly touches the corner of Jon's mouth, and he almost reaches out—

But Jon is entirely relaxed for the first time Jaster has seen, gone limp in the sun like a cat, and some of the lines of pain and stress have been erased from his face. He doesn’t quite look younger, but—happy. He looks _happy_ , and Jaster doesn’t want to do anything that will disturb that.

“There are still planets in the Deep Core that have ruins from the Infinite Empire,” Jon says, drowsy in the sunlight. His eyes are slipping closed, and he’s already relaxed but Jaster can see him sliding towards sleep. Unsurprising that he would need more of it, after the strain of the day. “And—the sect that became the Order—they started in the Deep Core, too.”

Jon is…not an uninformed man, it seems. Jaster wonders how he compares to the rest of his Order where knowledge of history is concerned, or if his breadth of understanding is entirely due to his atypical upbringing. “The Jedi Order has been destroyed _several_ times in the history of the Republic,” he says pointedly. “Even assuming that such old records survived, and that the Rakata _did_ once rule the known universe, the Infinite Empire collapsed at _least_ twenty-five thousand years ago, several hundred years before even the start of the Old Republic, and since then there have been at least three purges—”

Jon's snort is soft. “The Jedi exist with the Force,” he says, soft. “As long as there is one, there will be the other.”

Curiously, it doesn’t sound like a mantra, or even a quote. Jaster pauses, caught off guard by the sudden foray into religion, and considers the phrase for a moment. “And what sage said that?” he asks, bemused.

Jon's eyes flicker open, just long enough to give Jaster a curious glance. “No sage,” he says. “No Jedi would need someone to tell them what they already know.”

Jaster thinks, like a start, of Jon's words when he was explaining about how the Force-healing he had attempted left him weak. _Jedi are the Force made physical_ , he’d said, and Jaster hadn’t quite dismissed it as dogma, but—maybe he hadn’t paid it the attention it was due.

“Still,” he says, and the words take a little more effort to get out than they should. He feels…unnerved, and it’s hard to say why. “Regardless of the mystical nature of a Force connection, physical records being destroyed—”

Jon huffs quietly, head tilting back, and this time Jaster is moving before he can even consider the implications. His fingers stroke through dark hair with a hint of curl, and it’s…gratifying how Jon only twitches for an instant before he looks up at Jaster and smiles.

“No one’s ever found all the Jedi Temples,” he says, and his mouth curves, wry. “Not even the Jedi.”

Jaster can't help but snort at that, twisting a few strands of glossy hair around his fingertips. They're still soft from their washing, and Jaster is reminded of the sight of Jon, warm and still damp, flushed with the heat. He sets it aside, stroking Jon's hair with the vague thought of braiding it, but—the sun is warm, even as it’s fading, and he’s feeling a little lazier than he normally might, too.

“You had best be referring to sources beyond just the _Revan Mythologies_ ,” he warns halfheartedly.

“They're true,” Jon says, and he turns his head just faintly into Jaster's touch, then seems to remember himself and jerks away. He pushes up—

Jaster catches him by the shoulders, careful not to grab, careful not to jar, and guides him back down, shifting until Jon can pillow his head on his thigh. “Better?” he asks.

Jon glances up at him, and he’s wary again, tensed to move. It feels a little like a loss. “I shouldn’t—I've slept too much—” he starts.

Deliberately, Jaster drags his fingers through Jon's hair. “You need rest,” he says. “And Myles implied that meditation was also necessary, but I managed to distract you from it. Can you manage it lying down?”

Slowly, a little gingerly, Jon shifts, getting an elbow beneath himself and pushing up again. “Better to be sitting,” he says, a little rough, and Jaster grimaces but shifts closer, getting an arm behind his back as he sits up.

“Support won't disrupt these all-important Jedi rituals, will it?” he asks, a little dry, and Jon quickly shakes his head.

“It’s just—harder when I'm hurt,” he says carefully. “And—better to do it like I was taught.”

To help with concentration, likely. It makes sense, and Jaster hums in quiet assent, sliding his arm up a little to brace Jon more easily. Jon grimaces a little as he comes straight, hand going to his stomach, but after a bare instant he moves it away folding his hands together instead. One hand cupping the other, thumbs touching, Jaster thinks, cataloguing the pose with a glance; he’s never seen a Jedi meditate in real life before, and the explanations of the position and the meanings behind them are all but nonexistent in what literature he’s been able to find.

He files his first roster of questions away to ask later, when Jon isn't actively in the middle of his practice. As Jaster watches, feels through the arm around Jon's back, Jon's breaths are deepening, evening out. There’s nothing flashy, nothing obvious about whatever sort of connection to the Force this provides, just stillness and quiet and peace. Jaster might mistake Jon for a statue if he came across him like this without warning, if a lovely one.

It’s a little odd, though, to be reminded so clearly that the Jedi are monks for all intents and purposes. Diplomats, peacekeepers, watchers, but—a religious order that the Republic forged ties with, for fear of their power. An attempt to keep the Jedi under control, by some accountings, and keep them where the Republic could use them. But—

More than that, Jaster thinks, stroking a thumb over the soft cloth covering Jon's hip. Like Mandalorians are more than the sum of their wars, the Jedi are more than the sum of their service. A good thing to remember, in the context of marrying one.

Still. It’s a peaceful evening, and Jaster can think of worse things than sitting out in the sunset. He’d forgotten what they looked like on Concord Dawn, their particular brilliance in this atmosphere, and the reminder is a good one. He lets himself relax, and lets his mind drift, and doesn’t think about the piles of work still awaiting him in his office.

He has a wedding coming up. Surely that’s reason enough to take a small vacation, even if it’s only for a few hours.

A little amused at himself, Jaster shifts, leaning back on one hand, the other arm still wrapped firmly around Jon. It’s incredibly odd to think that in a handful of days he’ll be a married man, even if this is his own scheme. He’s never truly considered marrying before; he adopted Jango when he was young, and then found Arla a few years later, and between raising the two of them and the True Mandalorians and the civil war, he’s hardly had time for a steady relationship, let alone a spouse. His mother wasn’t married, either, and had no interest in such things; she wanted a child, so she found an orphan, raised Jaster and passed on all of her skills. It was good, and not something Jaster would ever want changed, but—

His passing impressions of marriage are probably woefully inaccurate, he thinks ruefully, watching a flight of birds wing across the sun-stained clouds.

It’s not an impossible thing to overcome. It’s likely not even very important that Jaster has never married, and doesn’t know all the pitfalls, given that he’s marrying a Jedi who culturally has no concept of the ritual, and who will likely be gone more often than not on whatever missions his Order assigns him. Still, the not knowing itches, and—

Something heavy settles on his shoulder, and Jaster blinks, glancing down to find Jon's head resting against his chest, eyes closed. He’s very clearly asleep.

A quiet laugh shakes loose from his chest, and Jaster loosens his grip, reaches up to brush Jon's hair out of his face and tuck the soft strands back behind his ear. “I'm fairly sure,” he says softly, “that this isn't part of a usual meditation routine, Jedi.”

There’s no answer from Jon, just quiet breaths against Jaster’s shirt, the warm slump of his body. Too much movement, Jaster thinks, and doesn’t move, just lets Jon sleep against his side. Too much worry, potentially—Myles can dress up his concern as wanting Jon to see the river all he likes, but Jaster's known him since they were both teenagers, and he knows how to read Myles. All of Myles's concerns about the security are founded in experience, given the Death Watch’s tactics, and while Jaster isn't entirely sure what Myles asked Jon to do, it’s likely related.

Jaster didn’t mean this to strain either Jon or Myles. But—

Well. There's every chance Jaster is feeling a little desperate, after Montross almost killed Jango _again_. Too many attacks, too much suffering, and the fact that Jango survived is down to Arla's quick thinking and speed with a jetpack.

“Well, this is cute,” Arla says from behind him, and Jaster tips his head back as her shadow falls over him, then reaches out, patting the bank beside him.

“I'm afraid that between the two of us and Myles, we wore him out,” he says a little dryly, and Arla snorts, eyes sweeping over Jon for an instant before she takes a seat on the grass, leaning back on her hands and stretching her legs out. The black and white of her armor is an eerie thing in the fading light, making her a ghost, a shadow, a bad dream. Jaster never would have _argued_ with her about the choice of colors, but—he’d had reservations about her decisions, certainly.

“Maybe next time he’ll be worn out for better reasons,” Arla says, and before Jaster can even narrow his eyes at her, wondering if that’s meant to be the innuendo it _sounded_ like it was, she adds, “Reasons that _don’t_ have to do with the Death Watch. A few of Myles's flunkies are looking into the information he gave us, and it seems solid so far.”

“I hardly think it would have been false,” Jaster says mildly, but Arla just tips one shoulder in a shrug. She doesn’t trust easily, and Jaster knows that it will take something truly impressive for her to accept Jon at his word. She has her reasons for it, and Jaster will never try to argue her out of them, regardless of his own faith in Jon's lack of intent to do harm.

“Countess Wren accepted your invitation,” she says instead. “Clan Saxon sent a messenger to Krownest, and they weren’t shot out of the air, so that’s a good start. Ursa said she intended to come with two guards and no other guests.”

“Well, easier to watch than a force of commandos,” Jaster says optimistically, carefully resettling Jon when he realizes Jon is starting to slide. “She’s currently…fifteen? A bold move for her to take my offer so readily.”

Arla snorts, but the curve of her mouth is rueful. “You do appreciate children being bold,” she says dryly. “Especially when there’s a chance they're going to stab you in the _throat_.”

Jaster smiles, and when she leans in, he presses their temples together, lays his hand over hers. “It seems to be turning out well for me so far,” he says. “Given my track record.”

“Old man,” Arla says fondly, and shoves him lightly as she sits up straight. “Have you gotten him to hand over his library pass yet, or do I need to hold him still while you beat him up for it?”

“It’s an _archive_ ,” Jaster says, exasperated, but when he reaches out to swat at her, she ducks away with a laugh. “And there will be no beating anyone up. I will approach the harpy _reasonably_ , when the time is appropriate—”

“So five minutes after the ink dries on your marriage certificate?” Arla laughs. She flops back before Jaster can get revenge, stretching her arms over her head, and hums lightly. “If Tor crashes the party, he’s mine.”

“Of course,” Jaster says quietly, because despite all of the pain Tor Vizsla has caused the True Mandalorians as a whole, he’s never argued with Arla's claim to his death. She was the one most grievously abused by him personally, and she’s made it her personal quest to execute him for it, which Jaster will never deny her. “Though Tor is a coward in his bones. I doubt he’ll show his face with so many enemies at hand.”

Arla makes a sound of disgusted agreement. “If something happens, I think Myles is going to go grey all at once,” she says, and casts a careful look at Jon, lashes veiling her gaze for an instant before her eyes flicker towards a lone hawk dipping over the river. “We don’t have enough _people_.”

Jaster breathes out a sigh. He’s well aware of that fact; their ranks are stretched thin trying to defend all of the settlements and colonies, and the Death Watch hits hard and fast and favors sabotage and terrorist tactics. It’s hard for anyone to mount a credible offensive effort when they're so busy trying to put out fires they can hardly keep up.

“Too many clans are staying neutral,” he says tiredly, and Arla at least won't think he’s any weaker for the exhaustion that’s been weighing at him for months now. Since Montross first betrayed him, and Jaster had realized with a bleak sort of shock that even the things he’d thought were safe and sacred weren’t anymore.

“Marrying the Jedi will help with that,” Arla says, bland. When Jaster slants her a glance, she arches a brow right back at him, and says, “I'm surprised you want the Republic weighing in on the war. And if you tie yourself to their peacekeepers, they _will_ weigh in.”

Jaster snorts. “It will be good for the old cowards in the Senate,” he says dismissively. “If they're forced to acknowledge a side, it will be ours. No one in their right mind would support Tor and his terrorists over an actual government. Then we’ll be able to send a senator of our own, and request aid. Food at the very least.”

Arla doesn’t entirely look convinced. “If you're not careful, they’ll just acknowledge the New Mandalorians and leave us and the Death Watch to burn each other out,” she says bitterly.

“No,” Jaster says, quiet but certain. “The clans would never stand for that. Getting rid of our heritage? Whether you're Death Watch or True Mandalorian, there’s no way you could accept that. The Senate is mired in idiocy, but that at least is clear to anyone with a modicum of sense.”

Something in the set of Arla's shoulders eases. “That’s true,” she says, rueful. “And who would they even _pick_ , on Kalevala? The duke? His twelve-year-old daughter?”

“Tor’s son,” Jaster suggests, mostly for the face Arla pulls. The only time she met Pre, she tried to strangle him with her bare hands, and Jaster can't entirely say he disapproves of the instinct. Pre’s supposedly foresworn his father’s violent ways, gone to live with family on Kalevala, and Jaster isn't one to doubt a teenager’s word, but—well. Pre takes after Tor a little too much for Jaster's comfort. Or Arla's, clearly.

“ _I’d_ stage a coup, if that happened,” Arla says disgustedly.

Jaster hums. “Technically, Pre is in line to inherit the Darksaber,” he points out, and—the weapon was stolen from the Jedi centuries ago, has managed to become a symbol of Mandalore’s leader. Jaster might not _agree_ , but he understands the historical significance of such a thing. And it’s a shame, objectively, that a brute like Tor carries an artefact once owned by Tarre Vizsla, one of Mandalore’s greatest warriors.

Arla’s sound of disgust is even louder and more heartfelt this time. “If we could get the Darksaber, I bet Tor would lose half of his support overnight,” she says, fierce. “All of those traditionalists following him because he’s holding it, they’d _rather_ be following you, but they're cowards—”

“Hidebound,” Jaster corrects dryly, but…she has a point. Tor has the Darksaber so well hidden that Jaster has never even _seen_ it, so there’s little hope of finding it, but if he _could_ get his hands on it, Arla's likely correct about what would happen to Tor’s base of support. Jaster knows full well that most of them hate Tor’s belief that Mandalorians are the rightful rulers of the galaxy, and his insistence on using underhanded, contemptible tactics, but they're so blinded by belief in his right to rule that they won't say anything.

Sighing, he shifts his arm around Jon, tugs him into a slightly more comfortable position. Jon huffs a little, curling in, and one of his scarred hands comes up, tangling in Jaster's shirt as he tucks his head into the curve of Jaster's throat like he’s seeking body heat. Like this morning, when he seemed entirely unbothered by Jaster on top of him, like the times he’s almost leaned into Jaster's touches, and—

Well. It’s appealing. Jaster is self-aware enough to admit that. Coupled with the image of Jon right after his shower, or the memory of broad shoulders beneath him, the way Jon shifted back into the curve of Jaster's body with an instinctive sort of want, it’s enough to make anyone with an interest in sex think indecent things. Natural. Jon is handsome, and Jaster is attracted. That doesn’t mean he’ll act on it.

“Well,” he says, forcing his thoughts away from the Jedi in his arms. “The support of the Jedi Order, and by proxy the Senate, will help us convince some of the less traditional clans that we don’t intend to repeat the mistakes of the past and launch an attempt to conquer known space. That should earn us a few more allies, if we’re clever about it.”

Arla grins at him like a tooka in the cream. “You should make Myles our new Senator,” she says. “His face will be _amazing_. I want to watch him have a crisis over it. _Please_.”

Jaster can't help it; he laughs, reaching over to scrub a hand through her messy braid and destroy it completely as she hisses in indignation, swatting and swiping at him.

“If I make Myles the Mandalorian senator, you can be the one to tell him,” he promises, and Arla thumps him in the ribs, but she’s grinning the whole time.

Jon wakes without any memory of having gone to sleep, limbs heavy and head fuzzy, to the sound of shouting in the distance.

Practically on top of him, there's a low groan, and Jaster buries his face between Jon's shoulder blades, arm tightening around his chest. Jon almost startles as the heat and breadth and weight of him registers, the brush of stubble, the drag of fingers over his side leaving lines of fire in their wake, and his heart trips into a frantic pace—

And then Jaster heaves himself up and is gone, leaving a whirl of cold air to take his place as he crosses to the door in nothing but low-slung sleep pants, grabbing a blaster off the wall as he goes. Jon can't feel any foreign minds nearby, but there's a wash of confusion and alarm even so, and he carefully rolls over and sits up, pulling the blankets around him. Even as he does, the door chimes, and Jaster has it open before the sound even fades, almost crashing into Myles as he takes a half-step forward.

“Myles,” Jaster says sharply, and Myles nods, in full armor with his helmet tucked under his arm.

“Sir,” he answers. “Jango's disappeared.”

Jon can _feel_ the lurch in Jaster, the way his breath catches and fear surges. “The cameras in the medical wing—” he starts.

Myles shakes his head. “Disabled, and both of the medical droids were taken offline.”

The fear settles into dread, desperate hope, determination. “Whoever took him can't have gotten far,” Jaster says grimly. “Arla?”

“Fine. She’s organizing a search of the surrounding spaceports.” Myles steps back, pulling his helmet on, and hands Jaster a much newer blaster.

“Get a group to sweep the house as well. If this was the Death Watch, they’ll have planted at least one bomb somewhere,” Jaster says grimly. He drops the old blaster on a chest and grabs a coat off its hook, then turns, casting a look back at Jon. He hesitates, then says, “Stay here, Jon. I’ll lock the door to keep anyone out.”

Jon opens his mouth to protest, then stops. Considers how he feels, the fact that quick movements likely aren’t going to be possible right now, and closes it. Nods instead, and Jaster's flicker of relief is clear.

“Thank you,” he says, and then is gone, the door sliding shut behind him with a thump of engaging locks. Jon can hear his voice immediately rise, Myles's rapid footsteps heading in the other direction, but—

There's no sense of alarm in the Force, even if it’s everywhere else in the compound. Jon trusts his instincts over everything, his connection to the Force even more so, and he considers it for a moment, the calm of it, the still pre-dawn outside the window. If something _did_ happen, he can't sense it anywhere, or any trace of the ill intent that would mark it. Instead, the world seems quiet outside of the frantic rush currently taking place.

Jon weighs his soreness for a moment, then carefully slides out of bed. He must have fallen asleep at the river and then slept all the way through until dawn, and he feels better for it; movement is easier, and the ache of exhaustion isn't carved into his bones quite so deeply anymore. When he takes a step, it’s not as steady as he would like, but he doesn’t feel like he’s about to collapse at the foot of the bed, either.

He hasn’t met Jango yet, only knows him by reputation as the Mand’alor’s son. Knows, too, that it’s possible to take anyone by surprise in the right situation, but—

Gingerly, Jon pulls on his clothes, then loosely belts the tunic and grabs his cloak, carefully hauling it up over his shoulders. His lightsaber is with the remnants of his old clothes, and he pauses, but finally decides to take it, sliding it up his sleeve instead of through his sash like he normally would, to keep from accidentally jarring anything if something _is_ wrong and he has to go for it quickly.

There's no one outside the door; the search seems to be spread out through the house, or heading out into the areas beyond the river. Jon spends a moment assessing where Jaster is, then turns, pushes open the glass doors leading out, and slips down the steps. It’s slow going, and every step has to be careful, but he’s moving at the very least. Moving, following the faint tug of the Force towards the edge of the garden, and Jon breathes out, lets whatever edge of tension was leeched from Jaster and Myles bleed out into the Force around him.

There's nothing but calm in the pre-dawn air, and Jon keeps walking.


	8. Chapter 8

The gardens around the house stretch for dozens of meters, neat but sprawling, and it takes Jon longer than he would like to make it to the edge of them. This portion of the house is relatively quiet, though, and dark; there's a search party moving through it, but they're on the far side, sweeping rooms. Jon can feel their grim wariness, but he doesn’t share it; there's no sense of wrongness, no enemies this deep in Jaster's territory.

There's no proof of that Jon can offer up, though, and he knows how people tend to react to mention of the Force, or Jon's particular unwavering belief in it, more immediate and less divorced than it is for even other Jedi. Jon was trained, though, raised to be as close to the Force as possible while still being alive, and he doesn’t know how to put into words what he feels. Especially not to people who can't touch the Force at all.

This is quicker, though. Even if Jon practically has to shuffle instead of moving with his usual speed, he can feel the tug of the Force, the gentle sense that there's somewhere else he needs to be. It’s the same sense that pulls Jon from one mission to another, even when the Order hasn’t sent him, but—softer. He doesn’t need to leave, just walk.

 _Shouldn’t_ leave, Jon thinks, pausing to catch his breath on the edge of an arching pavilion. He _shouldn’t_ leave, not just doesn’t need to. This, here, with Jaster—that’s the right choice, and for more reasons than just the life Jon took when he didn’t have a right to it. There's something coming, a change, a threat—Jon can feel it rising like the shift in air pressure before a storm, sharp through his bones. Maybe part of it is the wedding, because Myles's fears feel entirely right, but there's something else as well.

Jon can't see shatterpoints, not without days of meditation and an effort that makes the ability far more trouble than it’s worth, but—he thinks this is likely what it feels like. And he would lay every credit in the galaxy on Jaster being that shatterpoint, the embodiment of the change. Not all shatterpoints are bad; the Mandalorians changing their system will leave the True Mandalorians in charge, the Death Watch fading back into the shadows, and peace will follow.

If that breaks, nothing will change, and Jon has a cold, creeping certainty that the whole galaxy will suffer for it.

There's a whisper of uncertainty in the back of his thoughts, his Master’s cold voice telling him he’s projecting, that he’s _weak_. That he’s letting a desire, a bit of greed overwhelm his good sense. Jaster already offered him the opportunity to leave, after all, and he could take it right now. Could leave, go back to his mission of tracking down smugglers, go back to _helping_ people instead of indulging in…excessive luxury.

But—

Even over Dark Woman’s training, Jon trusts the Force. Trusts his connection to it, and the tether of it, and right now the pull of the Force is centered _here_.

Jon breathes in, breathes out, forces himself to straighten. Focuses, cataloguing what he’s feeling with the ruthlessness that Dark Woman taught him. He can't give himself quarter, can't let doubts creep in; if he’s not absolutely sure of each motion, and sure in the conviction that it’s for the right reason, he could find himself on the path to darkness all too soon. Everyone has darkness in them, but—Jedi have the potential to do more damage than anyone else, if they give in to that.

Power used through fear, used for self-serving means—that’s where the Dark Side rises. The only way to be sure to stay in the right is to know, pared down and peeled away to the very core, _why_ he’s doing the things he chooses. Anything less is walking a dangerous line.

He breathes, and straightens, and like the moment of meditation by the river, there's a wash of soothing calm that instantly spreads out around him. Meditation is _easy_ to slip into, even standing, even hurting, even when Jon had expected to have to struggle to empty his mind. The peace comes easily, and he breathes out the worry, the pain, the frustration with his own body, acknowledges all three and sets them aside, important but not allowed to be a distraction.

With a clear mind, it’s easy to find his center, to steady his breathing and his heartrate, to submerge himself in the flow of the Force. It’s like sinking to the bottom of an ocean full of light and shadows, and there's that same sense of having to _surrender_ , having to stop fighting if Jon wants to sink. The Force is everywhere, in everything; it’s energy and motion and each shift of the air in Jon's lungs, and if he’s part of it, Jon can feel how it moves more clearly than he can feel his own thoughts.

This is what Dark Woman wanted him to be all the time. She tried to push him until this state was natural, until he didn’t have to think to fall into it. Over the course of their training, she stripped his senses away one by one, left him without any of them, and pushed him further still. And—Jon had almost failed. If he’d loved her one ounce less, _feared_ her one ounce less, he might have wavered, fallen, made her put him down when he slipped into Darkness. But—

But even if he never managed to make this his permanent state, Jon still feels at his most centered, his most _real_ , like this. The Jedi are just conduits, physical taps for the energy of the universe, and like this, Jon can _feel_ that. He’s frail skin and fragile bone just managing to encase a splinter of the Force, and if he reaches, if he _listens_ , the splinter that makes him up still sings the same note as the whole.

Certainty is easy, when the overwhelming song of the universe is in his bones. A clear mind lets him see, lets him sort through himself, and Jon slides his fingers across the stone, pushes up as straight as he can.

The twist of the Force is centered here, on Concord Dawn. The Force is beyond space and time, and it bends towards those who shift it, change it. Jaster is one of those people, Jon thinks, and—

It’s not just because he wants Jaster, even if he _does_. Jon can face that much about himself. He wants Jaster in a way he’s never wanted another person before, a sweet ache low in his belly. The acknowledgement shivers through him, and Jon swallows, but—it’s true. Predictable. Desire is a normal thing to feel, and Jon's felt it before, but…not to this extent. Never to the point that he wants Jaster's hands on his and eyes on him and Jaster's body against his, for as long as he can keep them there.

Jon grits his teeth, digs his fingers into marble. He sets the desire aside, accepts its existence and looks past it, not about to let it influence anything else. And—things remain the same. The Force bends towards Jaster like he’s going to remake this whole portion of the universe singlehandedly, like something is _happening_ around him that hasn’t happened in a very, very long time.

But it isn't just bending around Jaster.

A little surprised, Jon opens his eyes, and he can almost see the energy around them, like a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. It shifts towards Jaster, shimmers with his fear and rising panic, but it branches.

Jaster isn't the only shatterpoint here, Jon thinks, and turns his head. Myles had said Arla was leading a squad towards the port, and—she’s what he feels there. A spotlight of vicious protectiveness and vengeful fury, ready to be unleashed. A beacon, a change in her own right, and Jon looks to her, then to the next warp of pending change.

It’s not far. Around the corner of the building, Jon assesses, and pushes away from the pavilion, each careful step carrying him right towards it. Jango's change is…more present. More immediate. He’s actively changing the course of things, Jon thinks, and breathes out, letting himself shake off the stillness of that particular state of mind, focusing on the here and now instead of the universe as a whole. It feels like coming back to himself, like a blunting, like a loss, the way it always does, but Jon lets himself feel the ache, focuses on putting each foot down without wavering, and rounds the edge of the house. There's a pool of light from a lamp, the edge of a shed, but Jon passes both, heading for a wild growth of roses that climb a latticework trellis.

Beneath the trellis, invisible in the shadows cast by the roses, Jon can feel a body in pain, and he breathes out a sigh, ducking beneath the trellis and sinking down on the cool grass.

“Jaster is about to wake up the governor and have her start doing planet-wide scans,” he says, which isn't that far off the truth, from the feel of him.

Jango, unnervingly grey in the face and sprawled out in a way that means he probably collapsed more than sat down, huffs vaguely, eyes still tightly closed. “What’s a Jedi care what my father’s doing?” he demands, but there’s no bite in it.

Jon weighs his potential responses for a moment, then says, “Arla pointed out that I'm going to be your stepfather soon.”

Jango pulls a face that’s pretty much a direct translation of how Jon feels about that fact. “You're what, twenty-six?” he asks grumpily.

Tipping one shoulder in a shrug, Jon settles back against the wall a little more comfortably. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was never told my lifeday.”

With a grunt, Jango cracks an eye open. “You count the first day of the year?” he asks, and Jon hesitates, then shrugs.

“No one asks,” he says. “I don’t tend to think about it.”

“What, the Jedi Order isn't throwing you some big celebration to honor their best?” Jango's voice is cranky more than sharp, tired and tight with pain. Jon doesn’t let the venom bother him.

“I don’t go back to the Temple much,” he says, and Jango sighs like he’s frustrated Jon isn't rising to the bait.

“You know my father’s only marrying you so he can get into the Jedi Archives, right?” he asks, closing his eye again. “He and that librarian have been fighting for _years_.”

“Archivist,” Jon corrects automatically, and Jango groans disgustedly.

“Two of you, _kriff_ ,” he mutters, and Jon ducks his head to hide his amusement.

The silence settles, lingers, and Jon gives it several stretching minutes before he says, “You were trying to get to the ships.”

Jango doesn’t answer, but it’s a tight, tense lack, like he’s braced for Jon to start making accusations. Jon doesn’t, just waits, watching him in the darkness of the roses, and lets the frustration and anger and dismay that Jango is feeling wash over him.

“Whatever you're doing, it’s changing things,” he says quietly, and the crack of Jango's laughter is rough and halfway to bitter.

“’Course it is,” he retorts. “That’s why I'm doing it. Jaster's…”

“In danger,” Jon finishes for him, soft, and he doesn’t know _what_ Jango was doing, but—he knows there’s something. Something centered around Jaster, and a decision, and something that’s left Jango feeling just as terrible as the wound in his stomach.

“I'm not going to tell you,” Jango says, harsh. “And you're going to keep it to yourself, _Jetii_ , if you want to make it to the wedding in one piece.”

Jon considers that, considers Jango. Jango's sure he’s doing the right thing, and—Jon doesn’t have any proof of whatever accusations he might make. Telling Jaster his son was trying to get to a ship and leave the planet likely won't do either of them any favors when Jaster will realize that on his own easily enough.

“You should stay,” Jon says. “Something is going to happen here.”

Jango opens his eyes, fixing Jon with a narrow look. “How do you _know_?” he challenges.

Jon hesitates, trying to put the feeling into words. “Your ship,” he says. “You know when the sound of the engines is wrong. If something breaks, you can feel the vibrations in the controls, and you know they're not what they should be. It’s instinct.”

“Experience,” Jango corrects sourly. “I don’t need some _Jetii_ magic to—”

“Instinct trained by experience,” Jon allows, unwavering. “I feel that. But…for everything.”

For a moment, Jango just stares at him. Then, loudly, he snorts, and reaches out, thumping Jon in the shoulder. It’s sudden, and Jon only just controls a flinch at the impact, but—it’s not actually hard enough to hurt, and he swallows against a dry throat, against a heartbeat that’s just a little too fast, and reaches out, offering Jango his hand.

“You didn’t dodge,” Jango says accusingly, even as he takes Jon's hand. “If you can feel _everything in the universe_ , you karking fake—”

Jon blinks at him, a little taken aback. “You weren’t attacking me,” he says carefully. “I wouldn’t _need_ to dodge.”

With a groan of clear disgust, Jango shoves at him. “Help me up,” he orders. “Before the old man gets himself thrown in prison for annoying the governor when he’s a felon. If Myles has to plan a wedding in a jail cell, he’s going to snap and murder all of us.”

Leaning down and crouching both seems like bad ideas, so Jon doesn’t try. Instead, he carefully shifts back, bracing a forearm against the wall, and pushes up. Jango gets a hand hooked into the trellis and staggers up at the same moment, a sound of pure pain wrenched from his throat. He staggers and almost goes down, but Jon manages to catch him and keep them both on their feet, though there's a slightly dubious moment when they both waver dramatically and Jon has to grab for the Force to stay upright.

“Kriff,” Jango finally manages, breathless and even greyer in the face. One hand is fisted, white-knuckled, in the shoulder of Jon's cloak.

Jon doesn’t point out that the open space where the ships are is up a hill, through the wall, and then across a stretch of open ground that would have left Jango fully unconscious if he tried to traverse it by himself, if even coming this far has left him wheezing for breath and unable to walk. He’s fairly sure he doesn’t have the right to throw stones, though, given that Jaster ordered him to stay in bed, too.

“Careful,” he says instead, and guides Jango through the first few shaky steps out from beneath the trellis. He has to take most of Jango's weight, but—it’s doable. Jon slept enough, recovered enough for this. They just need to get back towards the main part of the house so the search parties will find them.

Jango grunts, but distractedly. Most of his attention is on staying upright, and he hobbles along beside Jon, shaky and ready to fall, but Jon keeps a tight hold on him and doesn’t let himself waver, even when his chest pulls unpleasantly.

“Why?” Jango manages after a few wavering yards, and his hand goes tight in Jon's cloak again. “You're…”

Jon has no idea how he intends to finish that sentence, but it doesn’t matter. “Jaster was worried,” he says simply. “And I could find you.”

Jango casts him a sideways look, though he doesn’t say anything for several minutes. It takes until they reach the edge of the garden before he huffs quietly and says, “Heard you got Montross.”

Tipping his chin up, Jon refuses to look over. He knows what he did. “I cut him in half. He was about to raid a town with other Death Watch members.”

Several seconds pass, and then Jango sighs, annoyed, tired, pained. “Good riddance,” he finally says. “You stole our family’s justice, but—that _hutt’un_ needed to die somehow.”

Jon nods, and there's a growing ache spreading through his chest that’s unpleasant, and probably not a good sign, but— “I heard about his betrayal,” he says quietly. “The ambush.”

“On Korda VI?” Jango is quiet as he focuses on navigating a slight slope, then says, “Yeah. Sithing _traitor_. Tor almost—would have gotten us both. But Silas realized. Commed Arla. Got us backup.”

There were vaguely similar stories floating around, and Jon nods, relieved they were true, if only for the picture they painted of the True Mandalorians coming back together in the wake of the incident. Whatever fractures there had been before, Jaster's near-death had made all of them regroup, tighten ranks. They managed to push the Death Watch back, gain at least a little ground, and root out any of Montross’s supporters before they could do any damage.

“Good,” Jon says, about all he can manage, and feels a familiar curl of determination and cold, rising rage ahead of them. Closes his eyes, not able to summon the breath for a shout, but—

A bench rattles, tips, resettles with a loud thump, and there’s an instant reaction. Multiple boots on stone, the hum of blasters, and Jon looks up just in time to see Jaster's eyes go wide.

“Couldn’t even be bothered with a shirt, old man?” Jango complains breathlessly, and when Jaster drags him right out of Jon's grip and into a bruising hug, he groans loudly. “ _Ow_.”

“Just wait until your sister gets her hands on you,” Jaster promises, but the fracturing relief in him makes Jon smile a little. Carefully, he takes two steps back and sinks down on the bench, watching as Jaster pulls back just enough to cup Jango's jaw, looking him in the face.

“What were you _thinking_?” Jaster asks, exasperated, and Jango grimaces.

“I'm sick of medical,” he complains, though Jon can feel the way Jango's attention is partially on him, braced for Jon to say something. Jon doesn’t, just keeps his peace, and after a second Jango adds grudgingly, “I was going to find a speeder.”

Jaster closes his eyes for a moment, and the relief that trembles through him feels like a seismic shift, gutting and strong enough to realign continents. “You,” he says, “are very lucky you're pretty, Jango.”

Jango splutters, offended, and half an instant later there's a cry from above. Thrusters cut out, and like a shadow come to life Arla plummets out of the sky, her black and white armor catching the light. She hits hard, then hits _Jango_ hard, and Jaster prudently sidesteps just in time to keep all three of them from spilling to the ground. Instead, only Jango and Arla hit, and Jango yelps loudly, then promptly yelps again when Arla boxes his ears.

“Forget your _brain cell_ being lonely, you don’t even have _one_!” Arla says loudly, ignoring Jango's attempts to pry her off of him. “You karking _numbskull_ , your grand escape plan was to make us think you’d been _kidnapped_?”

“Ow, ow, _ow_ , Arla, I'm _hurt_ —”

“That’s the _point_ , Jango!”

Jaster laughs, but he takes another few steps away, and when Jon lifts his head, it’s just in time to see a hand coming at his face. He flinches on instinct, ducking, but instead of a grab for his hair or a blow, Jaster blows out a breath and drops. Jon almost startles away from him as he lands on his knees at Jon's feet, but big hands catch his own, close tightly around them, and he freezes like his mind’s gone entirely blank. Jaster is looking up at him, mobile expression still caught up in laughter and relief, and he raises Jon's hands, pressing them against his forehead for a long moment before he says, “Jon. Thank you for finding him.”

Jon swallows, and—he was expecting anger for not staying where Jaster told him to, not—this. Not Jaster's dark eyes on him, Jaster's hands tight around his own. Jaster on his _knees_ , right in front of him, and Jon closes his eyes and ducks his head, trying to hide whatever his face must be doing right now.

“Sorry,” he manages. “I…left.”

Jaster snorts. “For a good cause, if you were rescuing my son from his own foolishness,” he says, and leans in. Jon can _feel_ him, the heat of his bare chest close to Jon's hands, the touch of a hand on Jon's thigh, gripping lightly. His other hand settles over Jon's stomach, and he frowns faintly, looking up again. “You strained yourself. You could have commed me.”

His palm is warm, and Jon can't quiet breathe right. He can't think of anything except waking up with Jaster's arm around him, Jaster's breath between his shoulder blades, the prickle of stubble and the way his hands slid over Jon's skin.

“Jon?” Jaster asks, concerned.

Jon _wants_ him. He wants to see what it’s like to kiss Jaster, wants to slide down off the bench and press them together chest to chest and feel Jaster's bare skin against his own. Wants to run his fingers through Jaster's hair and pull his mouth closer and rub himself against Jaster's thigh. His skin feels _hot_ with those thoughts, with those wants, oversensitive and exposed. Jaster isn't a Jedi, but Jon feels like every desire is carved into his skin for everyone in the world to see.

Expecting him to form words when Jaster is touching him seems like too much to ask of anyone.

“I don’t—I don’t have your comm code,” Jon manages, and if it’s rough, almost inaudible, hopefully that can be blamed on the strain of too much movement.

Jaster pauses, startled, and then chuckles. He leans in, and Jon can't hide the shiver that trembles through him at the brush of callused fingers through his hair. Jaster tucks the wild strands back behind one ear, then leans forward, and says, “This time, I believe I have a very good excuse for this. Arms around my neck.”

Jon wants that too. Wants to be that close, even if it makes every muscle feel too hot and too tight all at once. Still, he hesitates, drawing back a little, and flicks a glance over Jaster's shoulder to where Arla and an unfamiliar man with brown hair are just hauling Jango back up between them.

“But—Jango,” he says, and Jaster steals one look back over his shoulder and huffs out a laugh.

“Arla and Silas have him well in hand,” he says, amused. “I’ll check in as soon as you're back in bed, where you should be.”

A thumb skims the curve of Jon's brow, and Jon shivers, ducks his head. Those words just make him think of Jaster's weight on his back, the arm around him, but—he wants more. Not just a hand on his stomach, but Jaster's hand sliding lower, maybe slipping beneath the waist of his pants, smoothing across his hipbone and easing them down—

“Jon?” Jaster asks, a little amused. “You must have strained yourself if you can't even focus.”

Jon swallows, breathes. He wants, but—Jaster is marrying him because of politics. He needs to remember that. It’s important. _Jaster_ is important.

“Sorry,” he says quietly, and leans forward, wraps his arms around Jaster's neck. Jaster's hair is soft against his cheek, and his skin is warm, warm enough to make Jon close his eyes and just—feel it.

There's a moment of surprise, then a quiet chuckle, and one of Jaster's arms slides under his thighs, the other looping behind his back. “There we are,” Jaster says, and lifts, and it _pulls_ for a moment, all across Jon's lower chest and stomach. He hisses before he can stop himself, burying his face in the curve of his arm, and Jaster hums softly, giving him a moment. “More bacta is in order, I think.”

“Sleep,” Jon manages after a moment. “I felt—better. When I woke up.”

“Yes,” Jaster says, a little dryly, and starts moving, steps carefully deliberate. “That would be what happens when you give your body time to rest. I appreciate you finding Jango more than I can say, but we’ll have to make preparations so that next time you don’t injure yourself further.”

“I felt him,” Jon says, a vague attempt at explanation. “In the Force. And I knew he was hurting.”

There's a sigh that ruffles his hair, and Jaster tightens his grip ever so slightly. “Jango learned his lesson, I think,” he says, and there's a touch of humor to it. “I doubt Arla will let him live this down until his next reckless stunt, but your participation in that one is strongly discouraged.”

“Noted,” Jon says. Jaster smells like the pillows Jon woke up on this morning, metal and sweat and something he can't name, but which brings up the thought of Jaster immediately. It makes Jon's mouth dry, makes his pulse a little quicker, and all Jon wants is to turn his face into Jaster's throat, set his mouth against the skin. It curls low in his belly, the wanting, and makes him feel shaky, unsteady, but—not _bad_.

“Jango says you only want to marry me to get past Madame Nu,” he manages, and Jaster's aggrieved sigh is loud and annoyed and entirely fond, and Jon can't help the laugh that shakes out of him at the sound of it.

Jaster doesn’t deny it, just says, “Jango talks _far_ too much for his own good,” and pushes open the glass doors of the bedroom, letting them swing shut again behind him.


End file.
